The Biden administration this week filed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over a decision made by a lower court preventing the U.S. Navy from mandating that Navy SEALs receive a COVID-19 vaccine, the Independent Journal Review reports.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last month upheld a decision made by a federal district court that imposed a preliminary injunction that prevents the Navy from keeping service members with a religious exemption from the mandate from being sent abroad.
"The Navy servicemembers in this case seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect," Judge Reed O’Connor of a federal district court in Texas wrote in his opinion in January.
"The COVID-19 pandemic provides the government no license to abrogate those freedoms. There is no COVID-19 exception to the First Amendment. There is no military exclusion from our Constitution."
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in an emergency filing made on Monday, "This application seeks relief from a preliminary injunction that usurps the Navy’s authority to decide which service members should be deployed to execute some of the military’s most sensitive and dangerous missions."
She added: "The Navy has an extraordinarily compelling interest in ensuring that the service members who perform those missions are as physically and medically prepared as possible. That includes vaccinating them against COVID-19, which is the least restrictive means of achieving that interest.”
Prelogar claimed that the judge's ruling hampers the Navy’s readiness by preventing it from making the decisions it deems best.
"Indeed, the Navy has informed this Office that the injunction has already compelled it to send one respondent to Hawaii for duty on a submarine against its military judgment," she wrote. "Other respondents occupy positions that may require them to be 'deploy[ed] anywhere in the world in the immediate future.'"