Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out President Joe Biden for continuing to kick out members of the military who are unvaccinated even though Biden considers the coronavirus pandemic “over.”
In a CBS News 60 Minutes interview, Biden said the pandemic is “over.”
“The pandemic is over,” Biden declared, before adding, “We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over.”
Pompeo, an Army veteran, tweeted, “Biden now says ‘the pandemic is over’ as he’s kicking tens of thousands of healthy soldiers out of the military with his COVID vaccine mandate.”
“These soldiers should be reinstated immediately,” he added.
The Pentagon is poised to expel tens of thousands of troops who have not complied with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s vaccine mandate, issued in August 2021.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks to the press on August 18, 2021, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. – Austin said Wednesday that US forces would evacuate as many people as possible from the Kabul airport as thousands pressed to leave after the Taliban takeover of the country.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks to the press on August 18, 2021, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. (OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
The military has already given involuntary discharges to nearly 8,000 troops, and tens of thousands of National Guard and Reserve troops remain unvaccinated despite their deadline passing on June 30.
Thousands more from each service are awaiting adjudication of their requests for exemption on religious or medical grounds.
The mandate has put a strain on recruiting, as 43 Republican lawmakers recently wrote in a letter to Austin first reported by Breitbart News.
They wrote:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over forty percent of men aged 18-24 years old have refused vaccination for Covid-19. In the Southern United States, an area responsible for half of the nation’s enlistments, that number is over fifty percent. Off the bat, your vaccine mandate disqualifies more than forty percent of the Army’s target demographic from service nationwide, and over half of the individuals in the most fertile recruiting grounds.
