I read through the new Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 this morning and noticed something pretty interesting: the 2018 National Guard will be ordered to get vaccinated or face suspension of pay. It turns out there are many vaccines for children but most are government funded and you can’t get vaccinated on the job.
My dad is a retired Major General. He worked 30 years for the Office of Special Plans – America’s war brain trust – and in that capacity he was responsible for creating thousands of false flag fake news documents based on their interviews with sources about how the Iraq War was fought – some of which he then had State Department officials circulate around the world. In the past, working for the government, he would typically be paid for travel, teleconferencing and other non-salary benefits. He retired on Dec. 31, 2015, as expected, at age 71, and has only been receiving lifetime full health benefits ever since. He is a part-time church volunteer in his retirement but much of his energy is now being put into promoting a new political action committee he started called The American Freedom Alliance. And like many other retirees, he is actively involved in the political process.
When I asked my dad about this bizarre report by my friend Gary Sick – a physician who worked on the failed Vietnam war transition at the Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services for over 26 years – he told me this had never come up before. Dr. Sick is concerned that we may be signing off on more wars and that the Defense Department is going to be laying off a lot of workers to pay for this new budget. He has been a critic of vaccines for several years and has recently started an organization called Americans Against Vaccine Socialism (A2V). However, he has not heard of anything like this before.
“I’m horrified and I’m speechless,” my dad said. “It’s a violation of Title 39, which does say that its not unlawful for a retired military person to disagree with something. In other words, a former military person has a right to disagree with government policy as long as they do not threaten it. Here we have two senior government officials putting forward an assault on free expression.”
This quote sounds like it should be in The Onion. Last year, four Republican senators who were also veterans sent a strongly worded letter to the Veterans Administration urging them to stop imposing crazy new restrictions on vet-doctor-patient relationship in home care. All of them were Republicans but one of them was John McCain. He has written a blistering article on what is happening at the VA and others, and this kind of thing just seems to fly in the face of what John McCain is all about.
This whole situation is crazy. It was like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel. My dad suspects that this is a power play by the Trump administration to eventually gut their funding and force them to be forced to close.
“They’re doing this to put a lot of people out of a job,” he said. “And it just sounds like they’re prepared to do it without regard for constitutional protections.”
Get yourself vaccinated.
U.S. Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis is developing a National Guard proposal that will require the Guard to get vaccinated against 19 different vaccines. He plans to ask for formal instructions from the White House on how to implement the idea later this week, according to CNN. The National Guard could be forced to temporarily stop paying personnel who decline to get vaccinated, and women soldiers and senior military officials would have to get vaccinated too. Soldiers who decline vaccination would not be dismissed and could choose to do so in military classes or other classes of service, the draft forbid for civilians. And since the Pentagon medical system already gives paid leave for religious, medical or other reasons, there would be no requirement to comply.