A group of Senate Republicans is demanding a vote on ending the military's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, threatening to try to hold up the Pentagon's most important annual bill over the issue.
In a letter Wednesday to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his deputies, the senators vowed to vote against advancing the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, when it comes to the Senate floor, which is expected to happen in a couple of weeks.
“The Biden administration's vaccination mandate has forced our nation's young patriotic men and women to choose between their faith and their career, between their medical autonomy and their career,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who organized the letter, said at a news conference Wednesday.
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“Congress should take action, and we're taking action today by saying we will not vote to get on the NDAA, the defense authorization bill, unless we have a vote on ending this military vaccine mandate,” he added.
Thousands of service members have asked for religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate, often citing concerns about the use of fetal tissue and beliefs about abortion. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines used fetal cell lines from an aborted fetus in the 1970s to test their efficacy but did not use the tissue in production. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine did use fetal cell lines during production.
This summer, the Pentagon…
