Military Won't Forcibly Administer COVID Vaccine to Public

Zach Rathner

Health

8th October 2020

Military Won't Forcibly Administer COVID Vaccine to Public

The military will help distribute the vaccine, but will not forcibly administer it (Getty Images).

The Claim

The U.S. military plans to force citizens to get the COVID-19 vaccine once it’s available.

News posted on

Emerging story

An article posted on the website “Before It’s News” is suggesting that the U.S. military will forcibly administer the COVID-19 vaccine to the public once available.

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Users across social media continued to push this claim.

Misbar’s Analysis

The Misbar team has determined that this claim is false. The Trump administration has said that a vaccine could be available soon, and the military is planning to help the CDC to produce and distribute the vaccine across the U.S.

According to this briefing, the military plans to assist in distributing the vaccine; however, there is no indication that they will force citizens to take it.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has said that he does not support a universal vaccine mandate, saying, “You don’t want to mandate and try and force anyone to take the vaccine. We’ve never done that. You can mandate for certain groups of people like health workers, but for the general population you can’t. We don’t want to be mandating from the federal government to the general population. It would be unenforceable and not appropriate.”

An article written in The Conversation says that states, cities, and employers have more legal rights to enforce vaccinations. The Misbar team could not find any information indicating that the military would be able to enforce a COVID-19 vaccine for the general public once it is available.