The COVID-19 vaccine mandate for members of the U.S. military would be rescinded under the annual defense bill heading for a vote this week in Congress, ending a directive that helped ensure the vast majority of troops were vaccinated but also raised concerns that it harmed recruitment and retention.
Republicans, emboldened by their new House majority next year, pushed the effort, which was confirmed Tuesday night when the bill was unveiled. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy personally lobbied President Joe Biden in a meeting last week to roll back the mandate.
Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said the removal of the vaccination requirement was essential for the defense policy bill to move forward.
“We have real recruitment and retention problems across all services. This was gas on the fire exacerbating our existing problem,” Rogers said. “And the president said, you know, the pandemic is over. It’s time for us to recognize that and remove this unnecessary policy.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that Biden told McCarthy he would consider lifting the mandate but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had recommended it be kept.
“I would remind all of you that the Pentagon has a range of vaccines it has long required,” Jean-Pierre said Monday. “So this is nothing new.”
The vaccine provision is one of the more acrimonious differences in the annual defense bill that the House is looking to wrap up this week and send to the Senate. It sets policy and provides a roadmap for future investments. It’s one of the final bills Congress is expected to approve before adjourning, so lawmakers are eager to attach their top priorities to it.
Service members and the Defense Department’s civilian workforce would get a 4.6% pay increase, according to a summary of the bill released Tuesday night. The legislation also requires a review of the rate of suicide in the Armed Forces since Sept. 11, 2001, broken down by service, occupational specialty and grade. It also requires the defense secretary to rescind the COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
Military leaders acknowledge that the vaccine requirement is one of several factors contributing to their recruiting struggles. It may dissuade some young people from enlisting, but officials don’t know how many. This year the Army missed its recruiting goal by about 25%, while the other services scraped by.
The reasons, however, are complex. Two years of the pandemic shut off recruiters’ access to schools and events where they find prospects, and online recruiting was only marginally successful. Finding recruits is made more difficult by the ongoing nationwide labor shortage and the fact that only about 23% of young people can meet the military’s fitness, educational and moral requirements — with many disqualified for medical issues, criminal records, tattoos and other things.
A congressional aide familiar with the negotiations but not authorized to speak publicly said lawmakers supportive of the vaccine mandate concluded that it had accomplished what it was intended to do by achieving a high rate of vaccination throughout the service branches, and that meeting the Republican demands to rescind it would allow other priorities to advance.
The mandate was enacted through an August 2021 memorandum from Austin. It directed the secretaries of the various military branches to begin full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces on active duty or in the National Guard or Reserve. They have not been required to also receive boosters.
Asked about the matter over the weekend, Austin told reporters he still supports the vaccine for U.S. troops.
“We lost a million people to this virus,” Austin said. “A million people died in the United States of America. We lost hundreds in DoD. So this mandate has kept people healthy.”
As of early this month, about 99% of the active-duty troops in the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps had been vaccinated, and 98% of the Army. Service members who are not vaccinated are not allowed to deploy, particularly sailors or Marines on ships. There may be a few exceptions to that, based on religious or other exemptions and the duties of the service member.
The vaccination numbers for the Guard and Reserve are lower, but generally all are more than 90%.
More than 8,000 active-duty service members were discharged for failure to obey a lawful order when they refused the vaccine.
The Marine Corps, which is much smaller than the Army, Navy and Air Force, vastly outpaces them in the number of troops discharged, with 3,717 as of early this month. The Army – the largest service — has discharged more than 1,800, while more than 1,600 were forced out by the Navy and 834 by the Air Force. The Air Force numbers include the Space Force.
The military services came under fire over the past year for approving only a limited number of religious exemptions to the vaccine requirement.
Military leaders have argued that troops for decades have been required to get as many as 17 vaccines in order to maintain the health of the force, particularly those deploying overseas. Recruits arriving at the military academies or at basic training get a regimen of shots on their first day — such as measles, mumps and rubella — if they aren’t already vaccinated. And they routinely get flu shots in the fall.
Service leaders have said that the number of troops who requested religious or other exemptions to any of those required vaccines — prior to the COVID pandemic — has been negligible.
The politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine, however, triggered an onslaught of exemption requests from troops. As many as 16,000 religious exemptions have been or are still pending, and only about 190 have been approved. Small numbers of temporary and permanent medical exemptions have also been granted.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the Defense Department made a rational decision in requiring a vaccine because “vaccines are the way you keep a community safe.” But at the end of the day, the bill needs to have bipartisan support to pass.
“It seems to be very controversial among Republicans in particular. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe it’s just because the government is telling them that you need to do this,” Hoyer said.
“Obviously,” he added, “the more people you have well at any given time, the better off you are in responding immediately, but there’s substantial sentiment on the other side of the aisle, which we need in the Senate, that believes differently, so we may have to compromise.”
McCarthy said that while he applauded the end of the mandate, the Biden administration must do more. He said the Biden administration “must correct service records” and not stand in the way of reenlisting any service member discharged for not taking the COVID vaccine.
The defense bill will support up to about $858 billion in spending. Within this topline, the legislation authorizes nearly $817 billion for the Department of Defense and more than $30 billion for national security programs within the Department of Energy.
The bill provides funding that’s about $45 billion above the president’s budget request to address the effects of inflation, provide additional security assistance to Ukraine and accelerate other DoD priorities.
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Associated Press staff writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
Pfizer is asking U.S. regulators to authorize its updated COVID-19 vaccine for children under age 5 — not as a booster but part of their initial shots.
Children ages 6 months through 4 years already are supposed to get three extra-small doses of the original Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine — each a tenth of the amount adults receive — as their primary series. If the Food and Drug Administration agrees, a dose of Pfizer’s bivalent omicron-targeting vaccine would be substituted for their third shot.
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said Monday that may help prevent severe illness and hospitalization from COVID-19 in little kids, at a time when children’s hospitals already are packed with youngsters hit by other respiratory illnesses.
Few of the nation’s youngest children have gotten their COVID-19 vaccinations since the shots were OK’d in June: Just 2% of tots under 2 and about 4% of 2- to 4-year-olds have gotten their primary doses so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The FDA has authorized the new bivalent COVID-19 shots — versions made by Pfizer and rival Moderna — as a booster for everyone ages 5 and older. Those combination shots contain half the original vaccine and half tweaked to match the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron strains that until recently were dominant. Now BA.5 descendants are responsible for most COVID-19 cases.
The CDC last month released the first real-world data showing that an updated booster, using either company’s version, does offer added protection to adults. The analysis found the greatest benefit was in people who’d never had a prior booster, just two doses of the original COVID-19 vaccine — but that even those who’d had a summertime dose were more protected than if they’d skipped the newest shot.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
China is easing some of the world’s most stringent anti-virus controls and authorities say new variants are weaker. But they have yet to say when they might end a “zero-COVID” strategy that confines millions of people to their homes and set off protests and demands for President Xi Jinping to resign.
On Monday, commuters in Beijing and at least 16 other cities were allowed to board buses and subways without a virus test in the previous 48 hours for the first time in months. Industrial centers including Guangzhou near Hong Kong have reopened markets and businesses and lifted most curbs on movement while keeping restrictions on neighborhoods with infections.
The government announced plans last week to vaccinate millions of people in their 70s and 80s, a condition for ending “zero- COVID“ restrictions that keep most visitors out of China and have disrupted manufacturing and global trade.
That spurred hopes for a quick end to “zero COVID.” But health experts and economists warn it will be mid-2023 and possibly 2024 before vaccination rates are high enough and hospitals are prepared to handle a possible rash of infections.
“China is not ready for a fast reopening yet,” Morgan Stanley economists said in a report Monday. “We expect lingering containment measures. … Restrictions could still tighten dynamically in lower-tier cities should hospitalizations surge.”
The changes follow protests demanding an end to “zero COVID” but are in line with Communist Party promises earlier to reduce disruption by easing quarantine and other restrictions. The changes have been highly publicized in a possible effort to mollify public anger, but there is no indication whether any might have been made in response to protests in Shanghai and other cities.
China is the only major country still trying to stamp out transmission while the United States and others relax restrictions and try to live with the virus that has killed at least 6.6 million people and infected almost 650 million.
The protests began Nov. 25 after at least 10 people died in a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi in the northwest. Authorities denied suggestions firefighters or victims were blocked by locked doors or other anti-virus controls. But the disaster became a focus for public frustration.
Ahead of the protests, the Communist Party promised to make “zero COVID” less costly and disruptive but said it was sticking to the overall containment strategy.
The party earlier announced updates to the strategy to make it more focused. Authorities began suspending access to buildings or neighborhoods with an infection instead of whole cities. But a spike in cases starting in October prompted areas across China to close schools and confine families to cramped apartments for weeks at a time.
Authorities say they are “further optimizing” controls and warn the country needs to stay alert.
China faces “new situations and tasks” due to the “weakening of the pathogenicity” of the latest omicron variant, a deputy premier in charge of the anti-virus campaign, Sun Chunlan, said last week. She said China has “effective diagnosis and treatment” and has vaccinated more than 90% of its people.
The ruling party is trying to balance “epidemic prevention, economic stability and security for development,” Sun said Wednesday in a conference with health officials, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Despite the changes, Beijing and other cities are telling some residents to stay home or enforcing other restrictions on neighborhoods with infections.
Travelers at the Chinese capital’s train stations and three airports are required to show a negative virus test within the previous 48 hours. Elsewhere, Guangzhou and other cities said areas deemed at high-risk for infection still face additional curbs.
A negative virus test within the past 72 hours still is required to enter public buildings in vast metropolis of Chongqing in the southwest, a hotspot in the latest infection spike. Dining in restaurants in some parts of Beijing still is prohibited.
A newspaper reported last week that some Beijing residents who have mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 cases would be allowed for the first time to isolate themselves at home instead of going to one of China’s sprawling quarantine centers. The government has yet to confirm that.
Forecasters say the struggling economy, already under pressure from weak demand for Chinese exports and a government crackdown on debt in the real estate industry, might be contracting this quarter.
Regulators have responded by freeing up more money for lending and are trying to encourage private investment in infrastructure projects. They have eased some financial controls on real estate developers to reverse a slump in one of China’s biggest industries.
“Policymakers are focusing their efforts on spurring growth,” Eurasia Group analysts said in a report. “However, even if China’s transition away from a strict zero-COVID policy is more decisive and accelerated, meeting public health milestones like increasing elderly vaccination will take months.”
On Monday, the government reported 30,014 new cases, including 25,696 without symptoms. That was down from last week’s daily peak above 40,000 but still close to record daily highs for China.
Xi’s government has held up “zero COVID” as proof of the superiority of China’s system compared with the United States and Western countries. China’s official death toll stands at 5,235 since the start of the pandemic versus a U.S. count of 1.1 million.
China also has suffered a possible rise in fatalities among people with cancer, heart disease and other conditions who struggled to get care while hospitals focused on treating virus cases. Data on those deaths haven’t been reported.
New Zealand is launching a wide-ranging inquiry into whether it made the right decisions in battling COVID-19 and how it can better prepare for future pandemics.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Monday the coronavirus had posed the greatest threat to the nation’s health and economy since World War II. She said now was an appropriate time to examine the government’s response with the highest level of independent inquiry.
Among the questions will be whether or not New Zealand took the right approach initially by imposing strict lockdowns and border quarantine restrictions in order to try and wipe out the virus entirely.
That zero-tolerance strategy was initially hailed internationally as a success because New Zealand’s death rate remained much lower than in most other countries and people were able to continue life much as normal.
But over time, the downsides of the elimination approach came into clearer focus as the economic and social costs rose. Some citizens faced big delays returning home due to a bottleneck at border quarantine facilities.
The government eventually abandoned its elimination approach in October 2021 after new and more contagious variants proved impossible to contain and people were given the chance to get vaccinated.
China is one of the only countries that continues to pursue a zero-tolerance policy. Experts say the approach is unsustainable over the long-term and that China has no exit strategy.
New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry will be led by Tony Blakely, an Australian-based epidemiologist and professor. From early next year, it has 17 months to research and prepare an exhaustive report.
Ardern said it was critical to detail what worked in its response to help the country through future pandemics.
“We had no playbook by which to manage COVID but, as a country, we united in an extraordinary way, and we did save lives and livelihoods,” she said.
COVID-19 Response Minister Dr. Ayesha Verrall said one of the lessons was that having a prescriptive pandemic plan, like New Zealand’s influenza-based plan before COVID-19 hit, was not much use.
“I imagine the lesson has been learned that just looking at the characteristics of one bug isn’t going to cut it,” Verrall said. “You have to look much more broadly.”
Chinese authorities on Saturday announced a further easing of COVID-19 curbs with major cities such as Shenzhen and Beijing no longer requiring negative tests to take public transport.
The slight relaxation of testing requirements comes even as daily virus infections reach near-record highs, and follows weekend protests across the country by residents frustrated by the rigid enforcement of anti-virus restrictions that are now entering their fourth year, even as the rest of the world has opened up.
The southern technological manufacturing center of Shenzhen said Saturday that commuters no longer need to show a negative COVID-19 test result to use public transport or when entering pharmacies, parks and tourist attractions.
Meanwhile, the capital Beijing said Friday that negative test results are also no longer required for public transport from Monday. However, a negative result obtained within the past 48 hours is still required to enter venues like shopping malls, which have gradually reopened with many restaurants and eateries providing takeout services.
The requirement has led to complaints from some Beijing residents that even though the city has shut many testing stations, most public venues still require COVID-19 tests.
The government reported 33,018 domestic infections in the past 24 hours, including 29,085 with no symptoms.
As the rest of the world has learned to live with the virus, China remains the only major nation still sticking to a “zero-COVID” strategy which aims to isolate every infected person. The policy, which has been in place since the pandemic started, led to snap lockdowns and mass testing across the country.
China still imposes mandatory quarantine for incoming travelers even as its infection numbers are low compared to its 1.4 billion population.
The recent demonstrations, the largest and most widely spread in decades, erupted Nov. 25 after a fire in an apartment building in the northwestern city of Urumqi killed at least 10 people.
That set off angry questions online about whether firefighters or victims trying to escape were blocked by locked doors or other anti-virus controls. Authorities denied that, but the deaths became a focus of public frustration.
The country saw several days of protests across cities including Shanghai and Beijing, with protesters demanding an easing of COVID-19 curbs. Some demanded Chinese President Xi Jinping step down, an extraordinary show of public dissent in a society over which the ruling Communist Party exercises near total control.
Xi’s government has promised to reduce the cost and disruption of controls but says it will stick with “zero COVID.” Health experts and economists expect it to stay in place at least until mid-2023 and possibly into 2024 while millions of older people are vaccinated in preparation for lifting controls that keep most visitors out of China.
While the government has conceded some mistakes, blamed mainly on overzealous officials, criticism of government policies can result in punishment. Former NBA star Jeremy Lin, who plays for a Chinese team, was recently fined 10,000 yuan ($1,400) for criticizing conditions in team quarantine facilities, according to local media reports.
On Friday, World Health Organization emergencies director Dr. Michael Ryan said that the U.N. agency was “pleased” to see China loosening some of its coronavirus restrictions, saying “it’s really important that governments listen to their people when the people are in pain.”
A top official at the World Health Organization said the U.N. agency was “pleased” to see China loosening some of its coronavirus restrictions, saying “it’s really important that governments listen to their people when the people are in pain.”
At a press briefing on Friday, WHO emergencies director Dr. Michael Ryan said the organization was glad to see China “adjusting their current strategies” in trying to recalibrate their response to COVID-19.
Last week, huge protests against the severe COVID-19 restrictions in China erupted in numerous cities, in the biggest show of opposition to the ruling Communist party in decades.
“We’ve all had to deal with restrictions of movement, we’ve all had to deal with having our lives changed and frankly, it’s exhausting,” Ryan said. The WHO has previously described China’s “zero-COVID” strategy as “not sustainable, ” saying that the super-infectious omicron variant made trying to stop every single case of COVID impossible.
Ryan said using imported messenger RNA vaccines, like those made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna, would be a “solid option” for China to boost its immunization coverage. China’s home-grown vaccines have proven to be less effective and scientists say any protection they provided is likely to have faded with the emergence of omicron.
The decision of which vaccines to use “are choices that sovereign governments need to make based on the best benefit to their population,” Ryan said. He said future strategies should balance “the control of the virus with the lives, the livelihoods and well-being and human rights of the people in China.”
China has been developing its own version of an mRNA vaccine and has yet to authorize either of the shots made by Western companies.
Unlike in many Western countries, vaccination rates among China’s elderly are lagging; only 66% of people over 80 have got one shot, while 40% have received a booster, according to China’s National Health Commission.
By comparison, 93% of Americans 65 and over have received a full course of vaccine and another 2% have at least one dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Numerous public health officials have warned that China’s zero-COVID strategy, which involves locking down entire communities if infections are found, serves little purpose given how easily the omicron variant spreads. But without significantly raising the country’s vaccination rate quickly, releasing those restrictions could produce a surge of hospitalizations and deaths that could overwhelm the health system.
In recent days, Chinese authorities have loosened some COVID-19 protocols in cities including Guangzhou and Chengdu, easing testing requirements and controls on movement. Still, many of the rules that brought people into the streets of Shanghai, Beijing and at least six other cities remain in force.
The announcements easing restrictions didn’t mention last weekend’s protests of the human cost of anti-virus measures that confine millions of people to their homes. But the timing and publicity suggested Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government was trying to mollify public anger.
Globally, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that about 90% of the population now has some kind of immunity to the coronavirus via prior infection or vaccination, and that the world is inching closer to the end of the pandemic.
“We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, but we’re not there yet,” Tedros said.
