Sometime in May, a 25-year-old Air Force recruit from Grand Rapids, Michigan arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio Texas, a major hub of Air Force basic training that graduates more than 35,000 recruits every year. His name was Airman 1st Class Keon Talik McDaniel, the youngest of 10 children in a large family. His father, Christopher, was an Air Force veteran, clearly instilling a desire in the younger McDaniel to follow in his footsteps. The young man had excelled in mechanical studies, and after graduating from high school in 2019 had obtained a certification in automotive technology from a local community college, working in fixing local cars. His dream was to apply what he had learned in a civil engineering squadron for the Air Force, working with ever bigger and more complex engines. He arrived at basic training “with boundless optimism and excitement.” At least, that’s
what his obituary now reports. Keon Talik McDaniel
would die a few weeks after his arrival at Lackland, the victim of a common disease that has been known to humans for millennia: The flu. McDaniel died in mid-June.
Of course, we’re only now finding this out, because the U.S. military has
a bit of a PR issue with mentions of influenza and flu shots at the moment, and initially reported the death as being only from a “medical emergency,” which is military and immigration agent code for “We don’t want to publicly admit how this happened.” For those wondering why the Department of Defense and DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth would suddenly pull a complete 180 and
reinstate the mandated flu vaccine for new recruits at the end of last month, we now suddenly have what certainly looks like a plausible answer: All it took was a pointlessly dead U.S. citizen. Unfortunately, that death comes as a direct result of Hegseth and the American military choosing to abdicate its duty to keep its soldiers safe, making “optional” the lifesaving vaccines that the average recruit may foolishly believe they don’t
need to receive because they’re currently healthy. Because we all know that basic training recruits are renowned for making informed, responsible decisions about their health, yes?
For decades, new recruits at Lackland would have been required to be vaccinated against all forms of contagious disease, from measles, mumps and rubella to polio, influenza and beyond. Said vaccinations are received right away upon arrival on base, during “Zero Week,” the very start of boot camp. The soldiers in training then
engage in a nearly 8-week “gauntlet of calisthenics, weapons training, classroom instruction and field exercises that include simulated combat scenarios.” The vaccinations have always been considered critical because of the intense close quarters and physical exertion involved: This scenario is bring together recently traveling people from all over the country and jamming them in high-rise dorms that each hold 1,248 recruits. These kids are in constant close contact with each other, sleeping only two feet apart. The spread of communicable disease is incredibly easy, which means the utmost precautions need to be taken. Still, respiratory diseases pretty much always manage to spread when you bring so many people together, to the point that
soldiers are known to refer to the constantly swapped illnesses as “barrack crud” or “recruit crud.”
So clearly, the thing to do was to lower the immune defenses of an entire incoming crop of thousands of fresh Air Force recruits, under the guise of liberty. On April 20, Pete Hegseth
announced via social media video (naturally) that the flu vaccine mandate had been made entirely optional, claiming that the department was “restoring freedom to our Joint Force,” because “your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable.” As Hegseth put it: “Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions. In other words, our men and women in uniform were forced to choose between their conscience and their country.” Bonus points: The
very first reply is from Health and Human Services Secretary/committed vaccine misinformation-spreader RFK Jr., saying “Thank you, Pete, for safeguarding the freedoms of our war fighters.”
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