The Navy has released new guidelines about its coronavirus vaccine mandate that explains what will happen to sailors whose requests for exemptions are denied.
Members of any military branch are eligible to apply for a religious or medical exemption from the vaccine, though only a handful of the former has been approved to date. If a sailor’s exemption request is denied, the sailor will have five days to start the vaccination process or get discharged, the Navy announced on Monday.
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The Navy’s vaccination deadline for active-duty personnel is Nov. 28, but personnel are not considered fully vaccinated until two weeks after their second dose of a two-shot vaccine or the first of a one-shot vaccine. That means Navy personnel had to get their final shot by last Sunday in order to comply.
Roughly 95% of the active-duty force is fully vaccinated, while more than 99% have received at least one dose.
For sailors who do not get the vaccine or an exemption approved, they will be discharged as general under honorable conditions, which would result in the loss of certain Veterans Affairs benefits.
Last week, a group of nearly three dozen Navy sailors, the majority of whom are Navy SEALs, filed a lawsuit seeking to get their religious exemption requests approved. Each of the SEALs and sailors involved in the suit are either Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.
Mike Berry, the lead counsel for the service members who are willing to comply with precautionary COVID-19 measures, previously told the Washington Examiner in an interview that their case is “actually fairly straightforward” because “the only thing the service member has to do is establish that they have a sincerely held religious beliefs and that the government is substantially burdening that sincerely held religious belief, that the government is substantially burdening their free exercise of religion.”
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The other military branches have similar vaccination rates, though there are small percentages of each that are holding out.
The Air Force is the only military branch in which a vaccination deadline has passed, which was on Nov. 2. Slightly less than 96% of airmen were vaccinated in time, while the Air Force had granted 1,634 medical exemptions, 232 administrative exemptions, and zero exemptions for religious purposes at the time.
