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COVID-19 cases among U.S. service members have been on a steady decline over the last month, as more service members have become vaccinated ahead of the Defense Department’s fast-approaching vaccination compliance deadlines.

The number of cases reached 4,902 the week of Sept. 8 but dropped to 863 cases last week, the military’s lowest number of cases since early June, according to DOD data obtained by VOA.

“The decline, it’s exactly how we wanted it to go,” Defense Department spokesperson Major Charlie Dietz told VOA on Wednesday.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memo Aug. 25 requiring service members to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or face penalties, leaving deadlines for vaccination compliance to the service branches.

DOD’s vaccination mandate came during a summer surge of the coronavirus across the country that was particularly hard-hitting for unvaccinated people. Nearly as many service members died in August as in all of 2020. More service members died in September than in August, and none of those who died in September were fully vaccinated, Dietz said.

According to data on active-duty troops obtained Wednesday by VOA, 91% of the Army, 99% of the Navy, 96% of the Air Force and Space Force, and 91% of the Marine Corps are fully or partially vaccinated.

But active-duty troops are vaccinated at a much higher rate than their Reserve and Guard counterparts, some of whom have deadlines as late as June 30, 2022.

With less than three weeks until the first of the military’s COVID-19 vaccination compliance dates, about one in five U.S. service members — hundreds of thousands of troops — have yet to get a single COVID-19 vaccine dose.

The Air Force’s COVID-19 vaccination compliance deadline is Nov. 2 for active-duty troops and Dec. 2 for Guard and Reserve airmen.

“With the Air Force deadline up first, it will be interesting to see how they handle things. They are our canary in the coal mine,” a military official told VOA.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department will roll out its plan for civilian workforce vaccine compliance on Friday, according to a military official. The rollout is expected to include how the department will track civilian vaccination rates and what will happen to those civilians who fail to comply.

President Joe Biden set Nov. 22 as the deadline for federal civilian employees to be fully vaccinated, the second-earliest compliance date for DOD, following the date for Air Force active-duty troops.

However, the Pentagon has not yet tracked or received self-reporting COVID-19 vaccination data for more than half of its roughly 765,000 civilian employees.

Catholic objections

As the Pentagon’s compliance deadlines near, the archbishop for military services says Catholic troops should be able to refuse the vaccine based on conscientious objection.

“No one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience,” Timothy P. Broglio, archbishop for the military services, said Tuesday in a statement.

The archbishop had previously supported President Joe Biden’s mandatory vaccination order for U.S. service members, and he still encouraged troops to get vaccinated in his most recent statement. But he added this week that the Catholic Church’s permission to get the COVID-19 vaccine should not overrule a member’s conscious objections to vaccines tested or derived from lab replicas of abortion-derived cells, which is how the COVID-19 vaccines were developed.

Katherine Kuzminski, of the Center for a New American Security, told VOA on Wednesday the statement “is threading a really fine needle,” adding that vaccines for chickenpox, rubella, hepatitis A and poliovirus were all tested with “abortion-derived cell lines” like the tests conducted for the Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.

“The question will be, has this person ever raised a conscious objection to a previous vaccine?” she said.

According to Dietz, the Pentagon currently requires at least nine vaccines for individuals entering military service, including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, measles, poliovirus, tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis, and varicella. Up to 17 vaccines are required for service members depending on their role and geographic region.

Objections have been granted to service members in the past for some of their required vaccines, such as the vaccine for anthrax, according to a military official.

Source: Voice of America

Australia is under growing international pressure to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but the policy is fiercely dividing its center-right government.

Australia is one of the world’s major exporters of coal and gas. Coal is mined in every state. Most exports go to countries in Asia, including China, Japan and South Korea.

In 2020, exports were worth about $39 billion. Trade has almost doubled in the past decade. But China’s informal import restrictions on Australian coal saw the value of exports fall sharply, although prices have started to recover. Coal also generates about 70% of Australia’s electricity. Coal-fired power makes it the most carbon polluting nation per capita in the world.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is planning to eventually shift his country’s reliance on coal and gas in favor of clean energy technologies, a shift from his time as a treasurer in 2017. In support of the mining industry, then-treasurer Morrison brought a piece of coal to Parliament to argue the need to continue producing coal in a famous scene.

“This is coal,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared. It’s coal that has delivered prosperity to Australian businesses and has ensured that Australian industry has been able to remain competitive on a global market.”

Clean energy is still an issue that deeply divides his center-right governing coalition.

Some members of the National Party — the junior alliance partner — are adamant that Australia’s coal industry is too valuable to lose and insist it will thrive for decades. Many regional communities depend on it. There is also disagreement about committing to a target of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. The prime minister said he wants to achieve net zero emissions “as soon as possible” but has not outlined any measures to do so.

But government lawmaker Trent Zimmerman said Australia must join the global push to reduce emissions.

“We need both the target and the plan that matches it,” Zimmerman said. “It is very hard to divorce the two and obviously much of the international community has moved in that direction. In fact, eighty percent of global emissions or thereabouts are covered by pledges that relate to reaching net-zero. So, it is important for Australia that we are part of that because it is the right thing to do.”

Morrison has said he is yet to decide whether he will attend the Glasgow Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in November. He told a newspaper that he wanted to oversee Australia’s eventual emergence from COVID-19 lockdowns. His critics insist he is “too embarrassed” by his government’s climate change policies to attend the summit in the Scottish capital.

Opinion polls by the Australia Institute, an independent public policy think tank based in Canberra, have shown that most Australians want stronger measures to curb emissions. A United Nations climate change report recently warned that global warming will inflict more severe and frequent droughts, storms, heatwaves and bushfires in Australia.

However, those surveys reported by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper also revealed support for the coal industry. Less than half of Australians believe that coal power should be phased out within a decade. Australia’s addiction to fossil fuels might be hard to give up, according to the survey.

Source: Voice of America