‘Military Leaders Broke the Law’: Over 200 Active Duty and Retired Service Members Demand Accountability for Harms Caused by COVID Vaccine Mandate
Over 200 service members and veterans signed an open letter alleging military leaders broke laws and violated rights with coercive vaccine policies. The signatories called for accountability and pledged to take legal action to restore justice.
Over 200 active-duty service members and veterans on Monday issued an open letter to the American people calling for accountability for the illegality and harms caused by the COVID-19 vaccine mandates imposed on U.S. military personnel.
The letter calls out prominent leaders, including General Mark A. Milley (retired), formerly chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other high-ranking officers, alleging these “military leaders broke the law, trampled constitutional rights, denied informed consent, permitted unwilling medical experimentation, and suppressed the free exercise of religion.”
The result of these lawless actions, according to the letter, is continued financial, emotional and physical suffering by many service members, including debilitating vaccine injuries, increased veteran homelessness and deaths.
Signatories include Robert A. Green Jr., commander in the U.S. Navy and author of “Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines: A Story of Hope for Those Who Love Liberty,” published by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), and former Army Lt. Colonel Bradley Miller, former Navy commander Dr. Lee Merritt and prominent whistleblowers Lt. Edward “Ted” Macie, former Army Lt. ColonelTheresa M. Long, M.D., and former Army Major Samuel Sigoloff, M.D.
Stating that they have “exhausted all internal efforts to rectify recent criminal activity within the armed forces,” and that those responsible have “refused to resign or take any other action to hold themselves accountable” or to “repair the harm their policies and actions have caused,” the signatories pledge to “do everything morally permissible and legally possible” to restore accountability.
Green, who is still active in the military, penned the letter in response to the lack of movement from armed forces leadership after several years of attempts by him and others.
“They’re not trying to repair the harms and or do what’s right to fulfill their own oaths to the Constitution,” he told The Defender.
The response to his book has been very positive, Green said, but “from our senior leaders, it’s been silence. I think they just hope that the whole thing goes away and they just want to get to retirement and it becomes somebody else’s problem.”
“But you don’t get home free in retirement,” he said. “This problem is not going to go away … For the leaders who did this, this is your problem and we’re going to hold you accountable regardless of whether you make it to retirement or not.”
Green said the courts, Congress and the executive branch failed to step up to address the problems with the vaccine mandates, which necessitated the Military Declaration.
Today, Green launched a related website and public petition that has already garnered over 3,000 signatures.
‘Restoration through accountability’
Among the actions the signatories will undertake are convening courts-martial for both active-duty and retired officers, introducing legislation to remove retirement income for complicit leaders and training others to “safeguard against such leadership failures hereafter.”
“There are eight or 10 veterans who are running for office at the state and federal level who made that pledge for accountability with us,” Green said, adding that for meaningful change to happen in our laws, “Folks need to get involved.”
“Let’s replace those people with real American patriots who understand the Constitution and the value system that we were founded on,” he said.
The letter suggests change will be “a continuous process with a long-term time horizon.”
“We didn’t get into this mess overnight,” Green said. “We’ve gotten into this mess over decades. So it’ll probably take decades to clean up.”
Green readily admitted that the courts-martial would require a change in leadership and that “None of us who have signed the letter have that authority.” But he surmised this procedure could be ordered by a secretary-level position or a president.
The letter borrows language and style cues from the Declaration of Independence. According to Green, the inclusion of signatures emulated the pledge the founding fathers gave to each other when they vowed their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.
However, unlike the original declaration, the military declaration does not seek separation from the Constitution “nor from what was handed down to us at so great a cost,” Green said, but rather “restoration through accountability.”
Miller said the references to the Declaration of Independence were “deliberate and meaningful” and that the signatories “believe that we have suffered a long train of abuses that has come to a head with the unlawful COVID-19 shot mandate.”
“We would be negligent in our duty to uphold our oaths to the Constitution as well as negligible in our loyalty to our countrymen if we permitted the continued demise of one of our most hallowed institutions,” Miller said.
Miller organized a Twitter Spaces discussion on the letter Monday. The recording can be accessed by clicking the image below.
‘Long train of abuses’ goes back 20 years
Pam Long, an Army veteran of the Medical Service Corps. and director of CHD’s Military Chapter, told The Defender that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisionshave made it necessary for the military to step up to clean its own house.
Those decisions tossed three cases challenging the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate because, after the mandate was rescinded in the2023 National Defense Authorization Act, those cases are now considered moot.
The Supreme Court determined that “These plaintiffs no longer have standing,” Long said, which gives the Department of Defense “an alibi to act like this was not illegal and to move on like it never happened.”
The decision also means those cases cannot be used to set a precedent, which, according to Long, means that the next time a mandate comes, legal cases will have to “start all over from scratch.”
“And that doesn’t help the 8,000 service members who were separated and are no longer in the military,” she said.
Long said because the COVID-19 vaccine fully licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was never manufactured, “the only thing available to service members was an experimental drug, which they legally had every right to refuse.”
Many of those service members received a “general discharge,” which, according to Long, often included misconduct codes related to their noncompliance with the vaccine mandate — marks that can prevent veterans from accessing the G.I. Bill for education and other benefits, she said.
Long emphasized the need for new bills in Congress that would change general discharges to “honorable discharges” and provide restitution for lost wages, retirement pay, demotions, injuries and deaths.
The “long train of abuses” referred to by Miller, according to Long, goes back at least to the early 2000s with the experimental anthrax vaccine and the neurological injuries it caused to service members.
Those stories and more recent ones are now being captured on the CHD Military Chapter website, in podcasts hosted by Miller and Dave Beckerman and in interviews with veterans visiting CHD’s “Vax-Unvax” bus.
