Can Troops Who Refused Anthrax Shots Seek Redress?
Time will tell whether military corrects records of troops who rejected orders By William H. McMichael – bmcmichael@militarytimes.com Posted : December 17, 2007 When a federal judge ruled in 2004 that the Pentagon’s mandatory anthrax vaccine inoculation program in effect at the time essentially was illegal, it may have opened the door for everyone who had been punished for refusing the shots to get their military records corrected. That doesn’t appear to be the case quite yet, even though Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia reaffirmed his ruling in August in a written opinion on a technicality in the same case. It is not known if the Defense Department has a stance on whether service members punished for refusing the shots can seek correction of their records; by press time, defense officials did not respond to a Military Times query submitted three days earlier. But the Pentagon continues to argue, according to that August brief, that its 1998-
