After a unanimous panel of three U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges in New Orleans refused to block the decision, the Biden government appealed to the Supreme Court. UPDATED March 25, 2022, 5:03 p.m. ET The administration asked for only partial relief, saying it did not seek to prevent the part of the order that protects plaintiffs from acquittal or discipline. Instead, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the attorney general, asked the judges to retain “the Navy’s power to decide which members of the service should be deployed to carry out some of the army’s most sensitive and dangerous missions.” Ms. Prelogar wrote that the order had already forced the Navy, against its military crisis, to send one of the plaintiffs to Hawaii for submarine duty. In general, he wrote, “Navy personnel operate systematically for extended periods of time in confined spaces that are mature breeding grounds for respiratory diseases, where mitigation measures such as distancing are not practical or impossible.” He noted that the military had long demanded vaccinations, beginning in 1777, when George Washington ordered the Continental Army to be vaccinated against smallpox. By early 2021, he wrote, nine vaccines were required for all members of the service. In August, the Ministry of Defense announced that it would add the coronavirus vaccine to the list. By the end of the year, more than 99 percent of active-duty Navy members had been fully vaccinated. However, the 35 members of the military service, all assigned to the Navy Special Warfare Command, refused, saying their religious beliefs barred them from being vaccinated against Covid-19. They had four kinds of objections, Judge O’Connor wrote: “opposition to abortion and the use of discarded embryonic cell lines in vaccine development”, “belief that body modification is an insult to the Creator”, “immediate, divine instructions not to receive the “vaccine” and “opposition to injecting traces of animal cells into one’s body”.
