Fox News host Tucker Carlson continued his relentless anti-vaccine crusade on Monday by bizarrely claiming that the military’s new vaccination mandate was an effort by the Biden administration to weed out Christians and “men with high testosterone.”
Following the Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of Pfizer’s coronavirus shot last month, the Pentagon ordered all active-duty military members to be fully vaccinated. According to Carlson, though, the vaccine requirement was a “new political purity test” by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
“This was specifically designed to separate the obedient from the free,” the Fox host grumbled on Monday night. “Can’t have any of the latter category.”
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Carlson, who has repeatedly sowed doubt about COVID-19 vaccines’ efficacy and safety, went on to say there was “zero scientific basis” behind requiring soldiers to be vaccinated against the virus that’s killed nearly 700,000 Americans. Never mind that service members have long been subjected to various immunizations, and a surge in the virus could negatively impact troop readiness.
Insisting that “virtually all” of the military is “at extremely low risk of dying from COVID” because they’re mostly young and healthy, the conservative primetime host went on to compare military suicides to coronavirus deaths.
“To this day, only 46 members of the entire U.S. military have died from the coronavirus over the last year and a half,” Carlson stated. “Suicides, by contrast, kill many, many times more. In just a few months last year, 156 service members killed themselves. So, military suicide is an actual crisis that the Pentagon might want to address. Lloyd Austin might want to look into that. But, no, that would get the Democratic Party nothing.”
Having thoroughly dismissed COVID-19 as a concern for the military, Carlson alleged that the vaccine mandate was actually a conspiracy to purge the military of virile, God-fearing men with minds of their own.
“The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who doesn't love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately,” he exclaimed. “It's a takeover of the U.S. military!”
Carlson then claimed he obtained a U.S. Army PowerPoint presentation that was meant to address service member concerns about vaccines, including a slide that sarcastically read: “How many children were sacrificed to Satan because of the vaccine?”
“Then the presentation proceeds to list the so-called tenets of Satanism which are taken from the Temple of Satanism website. So here you have the United States Army doing p.r. for Satanists,” Carlson fumed, framing the slide as proof the military was rooting out Christians.
While Carlson has continually railed against governments and businesses mandating vaccinations, his own employer has boasted about its internal policies that are similar to the Biden administration’s vaccines testing and vaccine requirements. Fox Corp., noting that over 90 percent of its employees are vaccinated, now requires that any unvaccinated full-time staffers submit to daily COVID-19 tests.
