Image: Wikimedia Commons
After the January 2023 rescission of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 military vaccine mandate, service members are still suffering at the behest of its untested and unlawful implementation.
The Gateway Pundit spoke with Captain Rebecca Tummers, an officer set to leave the Army at the end of August after 10 years of service. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Capt. Tummers was one of thousands of service members reluctant to take the COVID-19 vaccine due to concerns about the expedited timeline to create, test, and manufacture the vaccine.
According to her, “This rush to failure attitude did not take adequate time to identify possible negative side effects to the vaccine, nor populations that may be at increased risk of negative side effects.”
After months of declining the shot, she was “told staunchly” that she would soon forfeit her ability to earn a high evaluation if she continued to refuse the shot. The Army also threatened to separate her from service.
As previously reported by The Gateway Pundit, many service members were coerced into receiving the shot. They were made to feel as though it were an obligation to progress, and even maintain their careers.
Interestingly, Capt. Tummers said, “I had already secured my next job and really didn’t need a good eval, [admitting] I was willing to take the risk [a poor evaluation] so I continued to resist the vaccine.” While she would have willingly accepted the poor evaluation, her brigade and battalion commanders hit her with something she couldn’t ignore.
“The awards and positive personnel actions for my soldiers would not be processed if they came from a commander who had not been vaccinated,” she explained. “Therefore, any of us who were unvaccinated and submitting packets for a soldier to go to a school or to get an award for something good that they had done, that paperwork would not be processed.”
With that, Capt. Tummers was stripped of her “stubbornness,” she said. “Threatening the people that I’m responsible for and have an obligation to changed the dynamic entirely, [as] I wouldn’t do anything that would put their well-being or the future of their careers on the line because of my failure to get a vaccine.”
Capt. Tummers took the shot in March 2021, reconciling her action by saying she “would die for these soldiers if I had to, so what is another shot in comparison to that?” While her decision has not resulted in death or severe medical complications, it has placed another unexpected burden upon her that refuses to relent.
Inexplicable Symptoms
In November 2021, after serving three years at Fort Cambell, Capt. Tummers returned to the installation where she had begun her career: Fort Bragg, now known as Fort Liberty. However, her arrival to North Carolina was plagued by what was assumed to be a series of inexplicable allergic reactions.
“This was a bit strange, [considering] I had lived here just a few short years ago,” she said. Attributing her reaction to pollen, she tried “every [antihistamine] under the sun” to no avail.
Severe inflammation around her face and eyes landed her in the emergency room on several occasions. “It was extremely uncomfortable and just embarrassing and humiliating to go in public,” she shared. At the time, corticosteroids appeared to be the only solution.
In October 2022, Capt. Tummers was deployed to Baghdad, Iraq. She began to experience similar stateside symptoms to include not only swelling of the face and eyes, but also hives all over her body.
“I came back [to the United States] and put my foot down with the doctors,” she said, having grown tired of attempting to ward off the symptoms. After blood tests which included positive results for the high presence of antinuclear antibodies, an allergist failed to pinpoint the trigger to her reactions. A rheumatologist also struggled to identify the culprit to her ongoing problem, calling them benign idiopathic allergic responses.
Capt. Tummers was told that these cases are often triggered when people contract viruses or receive certain vaccinations. She then asked: “Did you receive the COVID-19 injection?” In fact, Capt. Tummers had taken the shot just months before her symptoms began and had gotten a booster for her deployment when her reactions increased in frequency, duration, and extremity. Her rheumatologist admitted that she was seeing an increasing number of cases like hers, and that “it is an unfortunate reality.”
“Over time I had begun to develop my suspicions that my reactions were related to the COVID-19 shot,” Capt. Tummers disclosed. “I went back through my medical history, my reactions, and the timelines associated with both, and after the meticulous inventory, it seemed like it was a plausible culprit, but I knew talk about the vaccine was a very polarizing issue,” she shared. “I was hesitant to bring it up with my medical providers because I knew they would be very resistant to admitting that the vaccine was the problem.”
She concluded, “They were the ones administering the shots so they would have every reason to defend its efficacy and safety.” And by her estimation, “To administer something harmful to people would have been deemed unethical and violated every medical provider’s code of ethics.”
Despite once giving military leadership and medical providers the benefit of the doubt, Capt. Tummers now knows the unlawfulness of the Secretary of Defense’s now-rescinded COVID-19 military vaccine mandate. Service members were never offered a vaccine with full FDA approval and licensure. Rather, they were subjected—without informed consent—to a vaccine issued under emergency use authorization (EUA).”
Today, Capt. Tummers makes a three-hour drive to undergo immunotherapy treatments twice per week, using her body’s own immune system to fight the symptoms she has determined were caused by the COVID-19 injection. “While I’m told that I’m just having benign, idiopathic allergic responses,” she said, “I’m hoping immunotherapy will eventually resolve all of this as I continue to undergo blood tests to determine if there is a bigger cause of the arbitrary symptoms I’ve developed.”
Recruiting and Retention Suffer
According to Capt. Tummers, “The vaccine did nothing to increase readiness of the force.” She explained, “Vaccinated soldiers still contracted the virus and went on 14-day quarantines, forcing us to operate with minimal manning.”
In addition, she said, “retention decreased as they enforced the mandate.” For example, she said, “many soldiers became ill after the vaccine and are no longer deployable or are receiving medical separation boards for medical ailments that came after the vaccine.”
Prior to the vaccine mandate, she noted, there were no existing cases of soldiers dying due to contracting COVID-19. “There were few existing cases of soldiers being hospitalized due to severe COVID-19 symptoms,” she said.
“For people like me who have been impacted negatively by the shot, there needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that some people did in fact have a negative response and those people were forced to get the vaccine against their own judgement,” Capt. Tummers asserted.
Like thousands of others are demanding, it begins with the acknowledgement that the COVID-19 shot mandate was unlawful and harmful, and those who pushed it must be held accountable. Thousands have come alongside service members by signing a petition that accompanies the Declaration of Military Accountability.
The post Army Officer Experiences ‘Inexplicable’ Symptoms After Being Forced to Take the COVID-19 Shot, While the Department of Defense Continues to Evade Accountability appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.