"COVID refusers to military reinstatement, how does it work?" Topic

I'm curious, the COVID reinstatement declaration says it:

"Allows for service members who were discharged from the military for refusing to receive the coronavirus vaccine to be reinstated and "revert to their former rank and receive full back pay, benefits, bonus payments, or compensation. Also allows those who left the military voluntarily rather than getting vaccinated to be reinstated "with no impact on their service status, rank, or pay.""

Does this mean those who were fired for refusing a direct order from the secretary of defence will get back to where they were or where they could have reasonably expected to have got to?

A benefit they have missed out on, surely, is four years of promotions….will the people who got the job they would have got if they hadn't been fired get demoted so that the reinstated can have the job they should have had? And how will they gain the 4 years of missing experience to justify that promotion?

Or will they just get reinstated at the same position they were at and be up against younger and more experienced colleagues when it comes to promotions? But that seems like they are still being punished for their decision not to obey an order….which would be a paradox.

This is one of those things that sounds simple but leads to a million questions (as you said), which will lead to lots of hearings and committees, and then in turn to a different variety of injustices than we have now.

Worse, what orders will people wonder if they can/should disobey in the future based on politics?

I suspect a lot of people will have built great new post-military lives for themselves and will only want the pay and "compensation" for the promotions they didn't get, so in the end it's just a whole lot of money.

But there won't be compensation for those who did not want the vaccine but took it as part of their duty. Neither for those who didn't want it but took it out of economic necessity. No matter how you slice it it won't be fair.

Since the military needs to send people to places with diseases and since those people will need to live in close quarters and since losing a platoon to an infectious illness could interfere with the military's mission and since vaccines work I suspect the military will re-write their legal language so in the future there will be no questions about vaccines.

Anyway, we will be reading stories in the press about your various points for the next ten years…

I think a lot of lawyers are going to be buying second homes on the back of this one – it does seem to be a potential can of worms.

So, let me get this straight
About 3-4 years ago, people were kicked out of the Service for refusing to obey orders.
Now, it's OK what they did, and are invited back as if nothing happened. 🙄

That's about the size of it.

Not as if nothing happened. Invited back with back pay and compensation for all kinds of things.

Three plus years of back pay all at once is pretty sweet. Hire a tax attorney so you can spread it over several years with Schedule J, that kind of sweet. I don't begrudge it, but I fear some people who took the shot and worked for those three years' of pay are going to begrudge it.

Sort of like how *I* felt when I paid back all my student loans decades ago and a certain Administration, naming no names 🙄, was falling all over itself trying to forgive student loan debt.

Amen.