One unexplained death in a young, fit, pre-screened soldier should have been a red flag. There are now over two and a half thousand reports, and almost no pathology to read them by.
Soldiers are screened before they serve. They are young, active and medically cleared, which makes them the cleanest population in the country for spotting harm from a new drug or vaccine. If even one of them had died shortly after receiving one, with no other explanation, that alone should have triggered a hard look.
Instead, the number now under review is 2,544. They are service member deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, and an Army physician has been assigned to examine them, according to a court deposition first reported by Politico. Every one of them is unverified. A VAERS entry means somebody judged the timing close enough to record. It does not establish cause, and nobody should pretend it does.
The Fauci disclosures reopened the pandemic file this year, and this review is one consequence. The harder question is what it would take to move any of those cases from unverified to verified, and how much of that evidence was never collected in the first place.
Who Is Asking
The physician is Lieutenant Colonel Theresa Long, now senior military medical adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an appointment made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Her record matters, because the credibility of the review rests on it. She earned her medical degree in Texas in 2008 and spent ten years as a field surgeon. She then trained in aerospace and occupational medicine at the Army’s aviation medicine school and added a master’s in public health. Before the pandemic, infectious disease physicians from the Army, Navy and Air Force briefed her on emerging biological threats. Looking for exactly this kind of problem was her job.
The appointment also reflects a principle. Every inquiry into what went wrong in the pandemic has so far been staffed by people who maintained that nothing went wrong, and each returned the verdict you would predict. Handing the question to someone who spent 2021 trying to raise it is a different design, whatever you make of the politics.
The Monitoring System That Did Not Exist
Long’s account, set out in a sworn affidavit that later reached Senator Ron Johnson’s Senate inquiry, reads like a paper trail of doors closing.
In June 2021 she emailed senior leaders asking why, when a novel virus had emerged next to a virology laboratory, the military had not treated it as a potential bioweapon until proven otherwise. Her training required that assumption: act as if the worst case is true and stand down when the evidence allows. She was called a conspiracy theorist and told that everyone knew it came from the wet market.
In August 2021 she wrote to an epidemiologist at the Defense Health Agency to advise on monitoring vaccine risks. The reply, as recorded in her affidavit, was that the military had no internal system for reporting and tracking vaccine adverse events. None. Two months after a myocarditis signal appeared in the medical literature, the surveillance did not exist.
She was moved to limited duties as a brigade flight surgeon, seeing patients with no command authority. On 29 September 2021, five student pilots came through her clinic. Three had been vaccinated. She thought they had pericarditis. The Army disagreed, and raising it cost her further.
That settles one point. When the Pentagon said there was no evidence of harm in 2021, it was describing a system with no mechanism for producing any.
“When someone is telling you there is no evidence, what they mean is no one has looked and no one cares to look,” said Dr. Philip McMillan.
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