A bill to cancel the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for members of the U. S. military. Providing a bill of about $858 to national defense was approved by the House on Thursday when lawmakers removed one of the last pieces from their annual to-do list.
The bill provides about $45 more for defense systems that President Joe Biden requested, the time Congress has passed his request a year in a row as lawmakers seek to bolster the country’s military’s competitiveness with China and Russia.
The House passed the bill by a vote of 350 to 80, with forty-five Democrats and 35 Republicans voting against the bill.
Now it goes to the Senate, where it passes easily, and then to the president to be proclaimed.
To gain bipartisanship for the bill, Democrats agreed to Republican demands to eliminate the requirement that military workers get vaccinated against COVID-19. The bill directs Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to rescind his August 2021 memo enforcing the court order. Days earlier, he had expressed his willingness to keep the mandate in force.
Rep. Adam Smith, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told colleagues that the resolution to impose the vaccine mandate was the right resolution at the time.
“It stored lives and put our force in a position imaginable for the pandemic,” Smith said.
But, he said, the directive required initial vaccination and now that coverage has dissipated.
“It’s time for politics,” Smith said.
Republicans said the mandate hurt recruitment and retention efforts. Mike Rogers, a senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said he intends to see in Congress who is being harmed by the mandate, “so we can review that and make it total to the extent desirable. “
More than 8,000 active duty military workers were dismissed for failing to comply with a legal order when they refused the vaccine.
“Some of the other people who left may not need to go back,” said Rogers, who will chair the Armed Services Committee in the next Congress.
Smith objected to efforts to praise servicemen who disobeyed an army order.
“Orders are not optional in the U. S. military. “””It’s the U. S. ,” Smith said. And if Congress expresses the view that they are, I can’t believe anything that most particularly undermines the intelligent order and the countryside within our armed forces. “
Military leaders argued that troops for decades had to unload up to 17 vaccines to maintain the force’s fitness, especially those deployed overseas. such as measles, mumps, and rubella, if they are not already vaccinated. And they get a flu shot in the fall.
Service chiefs said the number of foot soldiers who requested devout or other exemptions to any of those required vaccines, prior to the COVID pandemic, is negligible.
However, the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine has triggered a wave of exemption requests from troops. As many as 16,000 waivers have been or are pending, and only about 190 have been approved. A small number of transients and permanent doctors were also granted exemptions.
While the cancellation of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate has attracted a lot of attention, it occupies a paragraph of a 4408-page bill.
The defense policy law is imperative to shaping the military in the long run. It sets the maximum number of army personnel who can be in the other branches of the military. It authorizes cash for fast primary weapons systems and establishes wages and benefits. This year’s bill authorizes the budget for a 4. 6% pay raise for military and civilian personnel at the Department of Defense.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Senate Thursday he hoped they would succeed in a bipartisan agreement and act “pretty quickly. “
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the Pentagon’s COVID vaccination policy but said Biden would judge the bill “in its entirety. “
“What we believe happened here is that Republicans in Congress made the decision that they would rather fight the fitness and well-being of our troops than protect them,” Jean-Pierre said. “And we’re a mistake. “