On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the men and women who defend our nation will be able to choose whether to be protected from the flu. In his video statement, he said that service members will no longer be required to get the annual influenza vaccine because flu causes “no threat to our military readiness.”
Unfortunately, this is untrue. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, more than 20,000 U.S. service members died and hundreds of thousands were hospitalized. People of military age were among those with the highest death rates during that outbreak, impacting not only their health, but the U.S. economy and military readiness. Historians report that up to 20% of U.S. service members became ill. As a result, the U.S. military began pursuing a flu vaccine to ensure that, in the future, our nation’s defenders would be protected from this threat.
