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In April, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth changed Pentagon policy to make flu shots voluntary for all military personnel, declaring that mandatory influenza vaccines "weaken our war-fighting capabilities."
Within weeks, recruits at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio started getting sick. The virus burned through boot camp, and by June 24, according to a statement from Congressman Joaquin Castro, 275 people had been infected. The Air Force confirmed one trainee died June 12 due to a "medical emergency," though officials did not specify whether it was flu related.
The speed with which this all happened was not a surprise, according to Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases at UT Health Houston. The April policy change created an “epidemiological time bomb.”
"Military settings are prime for transmission,” Ostrosky said. “When you have an introduction of a highly communicable disease in a congregate setting like this, it's just going to spread like wildfire.”
Secretary Hegseth argued the voluntary policy would pose no threat to military readiness. But Ostrosky says the outbreak demonstrates the opposite. He explained that even young, otherwise healthy recruits can be bedridden for days or hospitalized with influenza. "It ends up affecting our readiness for combat at a time when we're having several conflicts throughout the world," he said.
San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, a Democrat who previously served as Undersecretary of the Air Force, drew a direct line between Hegseth's decision and the outbreak at the base. "Regardless of whether you want to believe it, science is a thing. It's really unfortunate that we're playing politics with people's public health and with things like vaccines." While a guest on TPR's The Source, she said this puts the nation's overall health in a precarious place. "Not only are we dealing with cuts to public health, but we are also dealing with the misinformation around basic concepts in public health, and there are real consequences of that."
Just 40% of Lackland’s spring trainees chose to receive a flu shot once it became optional, according to the Associated Press, but Ostrosky doesn’t blame the plunge in uptake on them. He believes it was driven by the broader climate of medical misinformation. He said recruits were questioning whether vaccines work, worried about side effects, and operating in an environment of deep mistrust in public health institutions.
In mid-June, the Pentagon partially reversed course, granting all service branches the authority to once again mandate flu vaccines for trainees. The shots remain voluntary for all other troops. A Pentagon statement said the decision was aimed at maximizing "operational readiness while safeguarding at-risk populations."
Ostrosky welcomed the change as a good first step but called for mandatory flu shots for all active-duty personnel. "The vaccination schedules that had been in place in the military are the result of decades of actual research and very deliberate thinking and creating guidelines,” Ostrosky said. "And it works."
More exceptions may be on the way. Army and Navy officials have separately requested Pentagon permission to mandate flu shots for troops deploying overseas, as well as for healthcare and childcare workers, according to the AP.
