About 100,000 members of the U.S. military were discharged, forced out, or left of their own accord due to their refusal to get the Covid vaccine. Today, most have not yet been compensated.
A week after he returned to office, on January 27, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling the military’s Covid vaccine mandate “an unfair, overbroad, and completely unnecessary burden on our service members,” and directing the Department of Defense to reinstate members of the military who were unfairly discharged. He also granted them back pay and benefits.
But in response to questions from The MAHA Report, a Department of War official said that only about 230 service members have been reinstated since the president’s order was issued and that the military is working with more than 600 others who are interested in reinstatement.
The statement begins:
“The Department of War and the Military Service Departments continue to expedite and prioritize the processing of reinstatement requests from individuals involuntarily discharged solely because of their COVID-19 vaccination status. As of June 2026, the Department has welcomed back more than 230 warfighters, and the Military Departments continue to actively work with more than 600 additional Service members interested in returning.”
The statement continues:
“Under updated guidance issued on July 21, 2025, the Military Departments may offer former Service members the opportunity to fulfill their service obligation entirely in active reserve status, with eligibility for back pay and benefits the Military Department Review Boards continue to evaluate and adjudicate reinstatement cases as quickly as possible and on their individual merits, as documented.”
And yet a majority of troops who were discharged for refusing the Covid vaccine are still in limbo.
The Department of War, as it’s now being called, declined to comment on the three class action lawsuits that were initiated by attorney Dale Saran on behalf of 1,324 soldiers, sailors, airmen and guardsmen seeking back pay, saying as a matter of policy they don’t comment on ongoing litigation.
Saran is a retired major in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he was a judge advocate for more than 20 years – essentially a defense attorney inside the Corps. In 2023, he and three other attorneys founded a firm called Military Back Pay and filed three class action suits in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims seeking back pay and other compensation for the plaintiffs, who’d been discharged or pushed out of the military for their refusal to get the Covid vaccine. One of the suits is for Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines and Space Force; another is for the National Guard; and a third is for the Coast Guard.
“We’re three years in and no one’s gotten relief yet. No one’s gotten paid. No one’s apologized,” Saran told The MAHA Report last week.
Saran said he’s made many overtures to the attorneys at the Department of Justice, who are representing the U.S. government, sending letters and proposals for settling the cases.
“They didn’t respond at all, and then it was ‘not interested,’” he said. “Nobody cares. They hate us because we’re trying to make them pay full freight for what was done.”
But it’s possible there’s a disconnect, or that a settlement is not far off.
This week, on July 15, five days after The MAHA Report’s initial queries about the issue of back pay, the Department of War sent a new statement with the surprising news that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is directing an outside organization to do a thorough review of the Department of War’s actions related to the Covid vaccine – an After-Action Review – to go over “lessons learned to improve future policy.”
In addition, the Department of War will convene an internal panel under the Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness General Anthony J. Tata, made up of military and civilian employees, to review the Covid-19 vaccine mandate. The objective of the panel, the statement says, is to “review the official decisions, coordination, planning and execution of the Covid-19 vaccine mandate from January 2020 through January 2023.”
Gen. Tata is quoted in the statement: “The Department is fully committed to restoring honor and rebuilding trust with the warfighters impacted by the Covid-19 vaccine mandate. Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, we continue to prioritize reinstatement, deliver remedies, and establish permanent safeguards against future mandates.”
Tata added that, “the actions detailed in these memorandums reflect our ongoing dedication to transparency and accountability. By having members of the affected community lead the internal after-action review and further analyze how the COVID-19 vaccine mandate influenced decision-making and readiness—and making the findings public—we will ensure that the Department learns from the past and does not repeat these mistakes in the future.”
In a memo that accompanied the statement, dated July 14, Secretary Hegseth ordered the declassification of the After-Action Review, saying it will be approved for release to the public by February of 2027.
The Covid Vaccine Mandate
The Department of Defense imposed a vaccine mandate on all military and civilian employees on August 24, 2021, requiring them to get the Covid vaccine. The service branches then issued their own mandates, and the pressure was on.
“In the beginning, none of us needed it, nobody wanted it,” says Derrick Wynne, who joined the Army in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, at the age of 29, and was an infantryman stationed at Fort Hood, in Texas, when the vaccine was first made available.
Soldiers were pressured to get it, and they began to comply. “They wore people down,” Wynne remembers.
Then the mandate came and things changed.
The Department of Defense, Wynne says, created a dog-eat-dog atmosphere and it was as if they were “at war with Covid.”
“They created this crab-in-a-bucket environment. The men you expected to protect you in battle were just folding,” says Wynne.
He said the superior officers “hammered all the people below them” to get the vaccine.
But Wynne had decided he wasn’t going to get it and stood his ground.
Every day, he says, he would get pulled aside by his team leader, his squad leader, his platoon leader and his company commander, and asked why he hadn’t yet gotten the vaccine. Every conversation was documented in memos. He was finally recommended for discharge and says Maj. Gen. John Richardson wanted to give him a dishonorable discharge but couldn’t because, by that time, Congress had prohibited the Department of Defense from giving dishonorable discharges over vaccine refusal.
Wynne had never applied for a religious exemption, saying this would have been tantamount to agreeing that the Army’s vaccine mandate was lawful, when he said he was sure it wasn’t. Why? Because, he said, the vaccine troops were being mandated to take was an experimental vaccine, and Army regulations prohibit troops from being mandated to take a vaccine that doesn’t have full FDA approval.
After his general discharge – not dishonorable but not honorable – Wynne was without a home for a year, unable to get a job or enroll in school and not eligible even for government benefits. He had to move in with his girlfriend’s parents, which he says was a “huge hit” to his pride and made him feel “like a 30-year-old bum.”
He called his state representative, and his Congressman, Rep. Brian Babin, and even approached Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at an event, asking for help. But no one would meet with him. He said Abbott promised someone would get in touch with him, but no one ever did.
Wynne is one of the named plaintiffs in Bassen v. United States of America, one of the three class action suits. He appears in the new film Duty to Disobey, produced by Children’s Health Defense.
In December of 2022, Congress included a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Department of Defense to rescind the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for troops. On January 10, 2023, then Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin followed through and officially rescinded the mandate.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) is demanding answers from Secretary Austin about vaccine injuries. A whistleblower had come forward with the astonishing information that the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showed big increases in serious health issues among members of the military after the vaccine mandate went into effect. Among them — a 130% increase in myocarditis; a 41% increase in pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung); a 38% increase in ovarian dysfunction; 38% increase in heart issues; and a 56% increase in cancer of the esophagus.
In the middle of the military’s worst recruiting crisis since Vietnam, and with thousands of troops leaving the service every month, some other members of the military were suffering side effects from the vaccine.
Still No Back Pay
Three and a half years after the vaccine mandate on the military was lifted, there’s been no real acknowledgement of the vaccine-injured, and still no back pay for thousands of service members forced out for refusing orders to get the vaccine – an order they say was illegal from the start.
Saran says the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records and the Board for Correction of Naval Records, and also the Coast Guard counsel, have taken the position that “if you don’t reinstate, you get nothing.”
But it’s evident that the great majority of the service members who were discharged or left the military over the vaccine mandate aren’t coming back.
Wynne is among them, telling The MAHA Report: “That would be like a battered wife going back to her drunk husband before he even sobers up and apologizes.”
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Your piece starts out with a wildly inflated number. Something like 8K were "forced out." Some service members retired or declined reenlistment, but DoD never published an official estimate of how many, and no estimate even approaches 100K.
The Department of Defense has consistently reported that roughly 8,000 to 8,700 active-duty and reserve service members were involuntarily separated solely for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.