by Ryan Morgan

In a settlement agreement submitted on Oct. 3, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, and Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro agreed to settle the pair of lawsuits—known as U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 v. Biden and Colonel Financial Management Officer, et al. v. Austin—which challenged the legal basis of the military-wide vaccine mandate.

The two cases were brought by servicemembers from all U.S. military branches, including numerous officers and several members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs. The Navy SEAL plaintiffs initially filed their lawsuit nearly two years ago in October 2021 after President Joe Biden ordered that all U.S. troops and other executive branch employees be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Military servicemembers have raised numerous objections to the military COVID-19 vaccine mandate, including claims that the various military branches routinely rejected requests for religious accommodations to the mandates. Plaintiffs have also raised health concerns over the relatively condensed timeline under which the various COVID-19 vaccines were developed and then granted approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

While the various COVID-19 vaccines were originally made available to the general public under emergency use authorizations, the FDA eventually granted full approval to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine version, later marketed as Comirnaty. President Biden introduced the vaccine mandate shortly after the FDA granted full approval for Comirnaty, but the lawsuits argued that the FDA-approved vaccine often wasn't actually available to servicemembers, meaning that the military vaccine mandate effectively required service members to take versions of the COVID-19 vaccines that didn't have full FDA approval.