If you’re an active duty, active Reserve, Title 32 servicemember (part of the Total Force) subject to the upcoming DoD Mandatory Covid Vaccine Shitshow, and you’ve found your way here looking for information about it – Welcome! You’re in the right place. Grab your favorite drink, put your feet up, and get your thinking cap on – I’ve got a lot of ground to cover and time is short. The Cathedral Media was reporting breathlessly yesterday that the FDA is going to “approve” one of the vaccines. Normally, I would first introduce myself, explain my background and history, give you a chance to judge my bona fides, as it were, and decide if I’m credible enough to listen to on this subject in this new era of misinformation we’re all living. For now, I’m going in reverse order. Info first, and then I’ll put up a post later (after this one) to explain my Ethos, as an ancient Greek rhetorician would understand it – the information that answers the question: “Who Am I? when I speak on a matter publicly.

I probably should say upfront that I am a licensed attorney, actively licensed in several states, and I have been since 1999. I’m also a former judge advocate. What follows isn’t legal advice, though, because I’ve never met you, nor formed an attorney-client relationship with you. What I can do for you is provide a roadmap of what you’re facing and arm you with some information based upon my past experiences – and in light of the litigation I am currently involved in to try to stop this vaccine mandate against servicemembers. I am one of several attorneys who filed a class-action lawsuit last Tuesday (I believe) in Colorado federal district court. That lawsuit’s primary focus was to ask a judge to prohibit the DoD from forcing anyone who has prior immunity from receiving this vaccine – regardless of the vaccine’s status with the FDA.

Our claim comes straight out of the DoD’s all-service publication – AR 40-562, ¶2-6. (The other services use the same pub, but it has a different name for each service. To reduce confusion, I’m just using the Army pub nomenclature, but it applies to all servicemembers.) ¶2-6 lists all of the medical and administrative reasons a servicemember could or should be exempted from receiving this vaccine. I have highlighted the important parts below.

Medical Exemptions.

a. Medical exemptions. A medical exemption includes any medical contraindication relevant to a specific vaccine or
other medication. Health care providers will determine a medical exemption based on the health of the vaccine
candidate and the nature of the immunization under consideration. Medical exemptions may be temporary (up to 365
days) or permanent. Standard exemption codes appear in appendix C.
(1) General examples of medical exemptions include the following—
(a) Underlying health condition of the vaccine candidate (for example, based on immune competence, pharmacologic or radiation therapy, pregnancy and/or previous adverse response to immunization).
(b) Evidence of immunity based on serologic tests, documented infection, or similar circumstances.
(c) An individual’s clinical case is not readily definable. In such cases, consult appropriate medical specialists,
including specialists in immunization health care.

Our lawsuit focuses upon¶2-6(a)(1)(b) because it relies upon sound immunology principles, namely that prior infection by a virus is the best possible protection and obviates the need for any vaccine, particularly given the lack of long-term safety data for the current vaccine. If you have something in your military treatment record showing that you already had Covid-19, then you should be exempted. It also means you are part of the class of people we’re in court suing and you’re entitled to ask the military to hold off on doing anything until your lawsuit is decided. If it’s not in your medical record, but you know you had it, tests are available commercially, but I can’t speak for any of them. I know some do a better job than others at picking up T-cell immunity and might be able to detect if you’ve had the virus for a longer time afterward, but it’s not foolproof.

One other point that I will make on medical exemptions is that it is perfectly legitimate to ask anyone providing you with medical treatment whether or not something you are going to be injected with interacts with other specific conditions you may have. For example, a relatively common genetic condition (~10%) among young black males is G6PD deficiency.

In most cases, G6PD deficiency does not cause problems. Problems may occur if you are exposed to medicines or foods that may harm your blood cells. Depending on your gene flaw, you may be able to handle a small amount of these exposures.

Administrative Exemptions.

The bulk of administrative exceptions to the vaccine will fall under the broad category of “religious,” but I would like to make servicemembers aware that there are a number of administrative exemptions worth pursuing, even if they are listed as being discretionary with the command. AR 40-562¶2-6(b) states that if you’re within 180 days of your retirement or separation, you may be exempted from deployment immunizations. Note well:

Personnel who meet separation or retirement requirements and desire an immunization exemption must identify themselves to their commander. The member must have approved retirement or separation orders. Active duty personnel continuing duty in the reserve component are not exempted on this basis.

AR 40-562 ¶2-6(b)(1)(b)

If you are within 30 days of your separation, you should be exempted under (b)(2).

AR 40-562¶2-6(b)(3) covers religious exemptions. This is a mix of good news and bad news. I’ve pasted the whole thing with my commentary below.

(3) Religious exemptions.
(a) Servicemembers. Immunization exemptions for religious reasons may be granted according to Service-specific
policies to accommodate religious beliefs of a Service member. This is a command decision made with medical, judge
advocate, and chaplain input.

1. Requests for religious exemption must comply with the provisions of the applicable policy and/or regulation for
   the Servicemember requesting religious accommodation. For the Army, religious accommodation policy is provided in
   AR 600–20. For the Navy and Marine Corps, waivers are granted on a case-by-case basis by the Chief, Bureau of
   Medicine, and Surgery. For the Air Force, permanent exemptions for religious reasons are not granted; the MAJCOM
   commander is the designated approval and revocation authority for temporary immunization exemptions. For the Coast
   Guard, CG–122 is the designated approval and revocation authority for religious immunization exemptions. USCG
   requests must be forwarded through the appropriate chain to Commandant CG–122 via CG–112.
2. A military physician must counsel the applicant. The physician should ensure that the Servicemember is making
   an informed decision and should address, at a minimum, specific information about the diseases concerned; specific
   vaccine information including product constituents, benefits, and risks; and potential risks of infection incurred by
   unimmunized individuals.
3. The commander must counsel the individual that noncompliance with immunization requirements may adversely
   impact deployability, assignment, or international travel.
4. Per DODI 1300.17 and applicable service regulations will be provided whether Servicemembers with pending
   active requests for religious exemption are temporarily deferred from immunizations, pending outcome of their request.
5. Religious exemptions may be revoked, in accordance with Service-specific policies and procedures, if the
   individual and/or unit are at imminent risk of exposure to a disease for which an immunization is available.

A few bits of commentary about religious exemptions.

• First, there are very, very good reasons of conscience to not take these vaccines. That all of the vaccines were made and developed using aborted fetal tissue is simply the most obvious “religious” reason because of (a) how politically charged that issue is in our national discourse, and (b) how it intersects with the views of major religious denominations. Please don’t limit your thinking that this is the only “firmly held religious” reason or belief that could justify an exemption. What you call yourself or whether it has the backing of some major denomination does not determine whether your belief is a “deeply held religious belief” or not. What matters is that if your belief system and cosmology for how the Universe works doesn’t allow you to be coerced into taking an experimental vaccine.
• Second, there are many good sites with templates in MS Word or PDF that you can work from to create your own personal request for a religious exemption. I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO REQUEST AN EXEMPTION. The DoD system isn’t setup to deal with 100,000 requests for religious and medical exemptions. Your single request may not seem like much, but it’s just like your vote – collectively, a large chunk of these could make a huge difference in stopping the whole damn thing in its tracks. The press around (for example) 175K exemptions and 25K courts-martial cases would be something the DoD and public could not ignore.
• Here is a simple Catholic template and a site with more detailed ones from the Colorado Catholic Conference.
• The social media platform Gab has a site with some very, very detailed Christian religious exemption requests in a variety of formats, with links to supporting information and documents.
• The Air Force instruction does allow you to submit a request for a “temporary religious exemption” even though the language of the medical instruction makes it sound pretty dismal. The Gab link above includes a text sample request for Air Force folks. USE IT and ADAPT IT TO YOUR SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES.

I’m going to close Part 1 of this to give you this info and give me time to do some more writing. I’ve put this on my dinky little blog because it’s the one place on the internet I know I can’t be throttled or shut down by being labelled “misinformation” by some fact-check twerp who knows nothing about this subject. In the next piece I’ll discuss the relevant federal statutes in play and discuss some larger reasons why I believe this whole response to the pandemic – the masking, lockdowns, and forced vaxxing – constitute a massive and flagrant human rights violation – a belief that I am not alone in holding, I hasten to add. A good number of highly credentialed experts, including doctors, medical ethicists, immunologists, nephrologists, and lawyers know that this is wrong. And that would be my final message in closing: You’re not alone. You are not crazy. You’re not a conspiracy theorist for asking why you should be given a rushed biologic product for something that is a non-threat to a healthy, young military servicemember.