Key GOP senator presses feds for source of vaccine at military bases after whistleblower allegations

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is pressing the Pentagon, Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for answers after multiple whistleblowers raised concerns about the provenance of a Comirnaty-labeled COVID-19 vaccine shipped to military bases.

On Monday, nine military officers from across all the branches sent a whistleblower report to Congress regarding a COVID vaccine appearing at Coast Guard medical clinics. 

Although labeled as Pfizer's fully-FDA approved Comirnaty vaccine, the vaccine does not appear to have been manufactured in Belgium as is legally required per its FDA approval letter, according to the whistleblowers, and may actually be the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine that's under emergency use authorization. 

The military can only legally force service members to receive vaccines that are fully approved by the FDA, not those under FDA emergency use authorization. However, service members who have been denied religious exemptions from the military's vaccine mandate are being forced out of the military, despite only emergency use authorization vaccines being made available.

Thus far, federal judges in various court cases have granted preliminary injunctions against the vaccine mandates in the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps for service members seeking religious exemptions.

According to one of the whistleblowers, a Coast Guard officer who was denied his request for a religious exemption, the service gave him five days to comply with the vaccine mandate after Comirnaty was delivered to his base's medical clinic.

On Thursday, Johnson wrote a letter to the DOD, FDA, and CDC regarding the whistleblower complaints, asking about:

• the manufacturing location of the vaccine lot delivered to military medical clinics;
• why the Comirnaty-labeled vaccine, which is supposed to have full FDA approval, is listed on a CDC database as a vaccine under emergency use authorization;
• why the vaccine is labeled as Comirnaty if it was created under emergency use authorization;
• identifying all vaccine lot numbers with Comirnaty-labeled vaccines that have been sent to U.S. military bases and are in the CDC database.