OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
3:56 PM – Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Terry Adirim, a former senior defense officer and top intelligence agency official who was instrumental in the Biden administration’s military COVID-19 vaccine mandate—was recently fired from her position.
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“Terry Adirim, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., was appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and performed the duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) for Health Affairs. As the ASD, Adirim was the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness for all Department of Defense health and force health protection policies, programs, and activities,” her bio states on the Department of Defense’s (DoD) website.
She was terminated due to her involvement in coercing military personnel into choosing between expulsion or receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine that was under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
“It has been assumed that the COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of transmission to others. Results during the delta predominance show that the viral load in the vaccinated population is not consistently lower compared to the unvaccinated, and during the omicron predominance, the viral load was even somewhat higher,” The National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health now admit.
“Public health data from the UK show that the number of COVID-19 cases is higher among the fully vaccinated and boosted population…” it continued.
Despite this, Adirim sent out a memo on September 14th, 2021, approximately one month after then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the vaccine mandate — telling DOD health care providers to consider the vaccine that is available to service members, Pfizer’s BioNTech vaccine, as “interchangeable” with a Comirnaty vaccine that has FDA approval.
“Per FDA guidance, these two vaccines are ‘interchangeable’ and DoD health care providers should ‘use doses distributed under the EUA to administer the vaccination series as if the doses were the licensed vaccine.’ Consistent with FDA guidance, DoD health care providers will use both the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine interchangeably for the purpose of vaccinating Service members in accordance with Secretary of Defense Memorandum, ‘Mandatory Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccination of Department of Defense Service Members,’ August 24, 2021,” Adirim wrote at the time.
A senior defense official suggested letting service personnel who chose not to receive the EUA vaccine to wait for the FDA-approved vaccine before being punished for not getting it, one month after Adirim released her memo, according to Breitbart News.
In a draft memo, David J. Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Readiness Policy and Oversight, suggested replacing Adirim’s orders.
“If a Service member, after medical counseling, declines administration of the EUA-manufactured product, DoD health care providers should engage with their logistics chain to secure and administer the [Biologics License Application]-manufactured Pfizer-BioNTech/Comirnaty product prior to any punitive action being taken against the Service member,” Smith wrote.
Adirim received Smith’s action memo, which recommended that she sign the draft memo with the suggested modification.
However, a “senior Air Force official” reportedly objected to the draft memo, which was sent to the military services for coordination, according to documents the press was able to obtain.
The official argued that implementing the change could expose the military to further legal action and potentially require it to undo sanctions already imposed for not taking the vaccine.
According to his response, the proposed change would imply that DOD views the vaccine produced by the EUA as distinct from the Comirnaty product approved by the FDA and could expose the Air Force to legal action. He also stated that since adverse action had potentially already been taken, “significant remedial actions” would likely be necessary.
The DoD faced legal ramifications when the idea was never implemented.
A defense secretary can lawfully mandate that service members take an FDA-approved vaccination under 10 U.S.C. Section 1107(a), but he cannot mandate that service members take a vaccine made by the EUA without first requesting and receiving a waiver from the president.
Additionally, in accordance with 10 U.S.C. Section 1107(a), the president must sign the waiver before the defense secretary may formally inform Congress of it. No such waiver has ever been reported to Congress.
The DoD faced legal ramifications when the idea was never implemented.
A defense secretary can lawfully mandate that service members take an FDA-approved vaccination under 10 U.S.C. Section 1107(a), but they cannot mandate that service members take a vaccine made by the EUA without first requesting and receiving a waiver from the president.
Additionally, in accordance with 10 U.S.C. Section 1107(a), the president must sign the waiver before the defense secretary may formally inform Congress of it. No such waiver has ever been reported to Congress.
However, it’s unclear if Austin ever followed through on his vow to seek a presidential waiver in an August 9th, 2021, memo to service members. He also promised that only the FDA-approved vaccination would be used in his order. When Breitbart News asked the Biden administration-controlled Pentagon whether Austin had ever asked for a presidential waiver to require the EUA-made vaccine, they received the same response that was used in Adirim’s memo:
“Per FDA guidance, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine had the same formulation and the two vaccines were ‘interchangeable.’ Accordingly, DoD health care providers could ‘use doses distributed under the EUA to administer the vaccination series as if the doses were the licensed vaccine.’”
For unclear reasons, Comirnaty has not been generally accessible in the United States. “There is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent COVID-19,” the FDA stated in a July 2022 reissue of its EUA for the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Service members eventually began to sue the DOD for attempting to force them to receive the EUA vaccination. Former Marine Capt. Dale Saran, the military lawyer who put a halt to the Pentagon’s anthrax vaccination in 2004, spearheaded one of the lawsuits.
“The undersecretary of defense for health affairs, a woman named Terry Adirim, published a memo claiming that the unlicensed product, BNT162b2 — Pfizer’s unlicensed EUA product — could be substituted in that it was interchangeable with the licensed product. … . That’s the fraud that’s at the heart of our case,” Saran stated.
Meanwhile, social media users on X chimed in to express their thoughts on the news of her recent firing.
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