Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackison here. Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl Ackison Podcast.

Today, big news on the COVID vaccine front. The Pentagon's Inspector General has ruled the

military is illegally issuing blanket denials of thousands of religious exemption requests.

These are confusing times. Even as the CDC has finally acknowledged what we've been talking

about for a couple of years, that natural immunity from COVID is at least as good as vaccine

immunity. Most studies, by the way, say natural immunity is far more enduring.

There are still irrational vaccine mandates in effect in some places.

Even though most people when asked don't think there's a COVID emergency,

most people, according to CDC, are at low risk of suffering serious illness if they get COVID.

Young healthy people like military troops have a serious illness risk from COVID approaching

statistical zero. Yet vaccine mandates are still in effect in some branches.

Battles are being fought over this and often won in court, but there's been no cohesive

military-wide approach to throw out the old policies that have been found to be unlawful for

various reasons. Now we're getting a look at a memo from the Defense Department Inspector General

that concludes the military has been illegally issuing blanket denials of religious exemption

requests, contrary to federal law and policy. This is huge. One interesting facet of the memo is

it begins to quantify just how many troops were trying not to get COVID vaccines.

In 190-day period, according to the Inspector General, at least 4,500 requests for religious

exemptions were denied. That means the military offices were being flooded by applications

for military troops to be able to skip the COVID vaccines. Today, I'm getting details on all of this

from David Yance, an attorney representing military troops. We start with some background

and then move on to the big news.

...