Hello. I'm a disability advocate who has been keeping as close a track as I can as an individual on the US administration's health policy since around 2016, as it has had geopolitical ramifications and influenced the decision making of multiple other countries including the one where I live.
I wanted to address a post that has been circulated which presents the idea of the US military ending vaccine mandates as a deliberate tool for colonial violence via weaponizing their soldiers as vectors for disease transmission as a far fetched conspiracy theory.
While I have not been as active in the last two years as I was the years prior, I have a lot of both personal knowledge and information to distribute. I'm going to be including a lot of links in this post. I am mainly focusing on covid here, because that's what I have the most information on, but other notable risks include STI's, HIV/AIDS, and other illnesses transmitted through airbourne or close personal contact.
While there may not be a Subheading On A Plan somewhere in The White House specifically laying out Operation Walking Bioweapon, the death toll on occupied populations will almost certainly be a Handy Bonus to any admin that implements a removal of vaccine mandates for military personnel, particularly the openly incredibly vicious and actively murderous US one. I'm going to focus on the US admin in particular when talking about this as they have a disproportionate presence around the world in the form of their military bases, and command a huge amount of hard and soft power to get their troops from place to place.
The decision makers will have absolutely taken the risk of disease transmission into account, because they are ghouls who are and have already been using disease as a means to winnow populations they deem undesirable via enabling, deepening and refusing to address existing inequities because they are white supremacists, eugenicists, and imperialists.
I cannot overstate how direct Trump is about his desire to kill people who are not white. He just says it. Regularly. He talks about people he despises in deliberately dehumanizing language, has them rounded up and kept in conditions that actively proliferate sickness, and is stoked about it when they die because the cruelty is the point.
I've lost so many peers at this point as a direct consequence of the attacks on global public health spearheaded by the US administration. I know cancer patients who have been directed to unmask, I personally have to advocate for myself as an immunocompromised person on the other side of the world if I want a health professional to wear a mask while attending to me as a consequence of American anti-mask talking points being imported by our local right wing and used to weaken our own protections.
Every time someone isn't willing to wear a mask while they've got covid or another transmissable illness without a medical reason? They've been successfully weaponized against vulnerable populations not just at home, but also abroad. A person they infect gets on a flight. They infect other passengers on board the plane because they're not masking. That person goes to a country where vaccine manufacturing and distribution has been sabotaged by things like IP disputes and the domination of vaccine supplies by wealthier nations. An Indigenous community is ravaged by illness. The original sick person might not ever see the face of the person their choice kills or permanently disables. That doesn't mean it's not happening.
As for whether the military could even be a pathway for the kind of outcome the tagger describes. Yes. Extremely. The only reason this is a remotely controversial idea is because it's a 'who watches the watchers' situation and a large number of studies on the military as a vector for pathogenic transmission come from various world militaries, but here's an overview for consideration:
The military as a neglected pathogen transmitter, from the nineteenth century to COVID-19: a systematic review
"For example, the so-called Spanish Flu infected around 500 million people, one third of the world’s population at the time, killing at least 50 million—by some counts around 100 million. Despite its name, recent historiography suggests that this pandemic originated not in Spain but in the United States of America (USA), in Camp Funston, Fort Riley, Kansas, with US soldiers carrying it to Europe as they crossed the Atlantic to join allied troops in the First World War [10]. Another instance of military transmission is the case of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which ravaged both military personnel and Korean civilians living close to or within US military camp towns (kiji‑chon), between the end of the Korean War and late into the twentieth century [11]."
Going to put a secondary link here that covers the link between sexual violence and the US military and military bases, specifically focused in API communities and nations.
"Vaccination programs Of the 180 studies identifying social mechanisms of transmission, 10% (18/180) reported suboptimal vaccination programs as contributing to disease incidence. Reasons included discontinuation of vaccines by suppliers during, or leading up to, the study period [32], low vaccine supply during the study period [34], or immunization not required for enrolment [35]. One study with two groups exposed to an infectious agent reported the outbreak almost entirely in the non-vaccinated group [36]. Of studies reporting absent or inadequate vaccination programs, 33% (6/18) described military populations with less than 35% of personnel vaccinated against the outbreak-causing disease."
"Discussion Our systematic review confirms that multiple mechanisms drive disease transmission within military missions, bases, and medical institutions, into civilian populations. Both biological mechanisms of transmission—a critical one being contaminated food/water—and social mechanisms—such as crowded living, sleeping, and training practices—were common, and are shared by other social groups and institutions. However, selected social mechanisms were unique to the military, such as pressure from military leadership to prioritize military goals over public health safety and occupation-specific freedom of movement. We also found that these social mechanisms have been occurring in military environments as early as 1810 [58]. We posit that they continue into the twenty-first century despite knowledge of disease containment measures because they are generally accepted as normal and necessary to military goals. We also note that while our findings should not be construed as supporting any specific public health policy, neglecting the role of the military as a pathogen transmitter may have important implications for the wellbeing of communities, for policy formulation, and for global health equity, especially as the military is increasingly assigned tasks overlapping those of humanitarian and medical personnel [59, 60]. Only a few articles studied the impact of disease transmission on civilians (17%; 36/210), despite many reporting information suggesting that civilians were very likely to have been impacted by military outbreaks, such as military personnel granted family leave during the study, dependents living among military personnel, military personnel deployed to bases near civilian populations, and/or military personnel visiting civilian areas (e.g., ports, food vendors, brothels). These findings reveal a trend in the literature whereby studies involving military populations limit their analyses to those populations despite their likely implications on civilians, indicating a gap with potential public health implications. Because studies involving military populations are often conducted by military affiliated researchers, reporting on civilians may be considered beyond the scope of such studies. In fact, the single systematic review on this topic that we identified was not published in a military journal yet was almost entirely devoted to underscoring the threat the circumstances of civilian life and work may pose to service members [9]. We grant that this is an important point but posit that given the circumstances under which military-to-civilian or civilian-to-military disease spread may occur, these populations are linked and more studies comprehensively investigating transmission among these populations are needed."
This is an Extremely Known Problem in disability advocacy circles, especially for Indigenous people who are often subject to profound impact from nearby military bases, as discussed. It's also an issue with tourists who refuse to get vaccinated. Not to mention the history of things like "smallpox blankets" as tools of biological warfare, and the history of crimes against humanity in research of biological weaponry from multiple countries in the modern day as tools various militaries have used and been stoked about using.
"They'd rather jail or conscript you than feed or house you" is also an accurate evaluation of some of the core political priorities of the US admin, amongst others (it is where I am in Aotearoa as well) that simultaneously criminalize homelessness, push for forced institutionalization (with its subsequent past and active history of then using that as a vector for crimes against humanity) and create and exacerbate existing loopholes to enslave those they imprison.
Not even getting into what they're doing to people with ICE at the moment.
Including additional info here on soldiers as vectors for disease targeting marginalized populations as outgrowth of the sexual violence they commit. This isn't something that generals and those making policy decisions are like. Eyes closed on.
When the US government is actively eroding public health, specifically targeting marginalized populations, actively sabotaging the ability to gather data on the rates of sickness and death, and gleefully announcing a new wave of colonial activity, then, no, it's not a conspiracy theory to notice how that will intertwine with the end of vaccine mandates for soldiers, that's accurate observation of the mechanics of necropolitics.
The US has at least one hundred and twenty eight military bases around the world.
This is an extreme aberration compared to Every Other Country On The Planet.
You cannot simultaneously at home:
Actively sabotage public faith in vaccines on an international level while also knowing that doing so will lead to preventable deaths
Actively proliferate misinformation on multiple diseases, and advocate for and implement bans on public health measures that work, like masks
Actively slash social protections around disability and implement sanctions known to be both counterproductive and lethal
Criminalize homelessness
Lift mandates around vaccination for those working with vulnerable populations
Add in additional pathways to force people into institutionalization
Apply pressure to both local and international governments to stop collecting data on infection rates
Withdraw from the world health organization
and
not expect your soldiers, many of whom are also racially marginalized and specifically targeted by recruiters because of being low income, to both die overseas and also kill people in their deployed areas by discouraging them from vaccinating and then deploying them out to one of your, again, one hundred and twenty eight military bases around the world.
Like. It comes back to the whole "conspiracy theories are either rooted in ancient anti-semitism or it's stuff that the US administration has later admitted to just actually doing" thing like MK Ultra, which is also relevant reading here in case you think it's a stretch that perhaps the government would do atrocities on purpose for military gain.
This isn't just specific to the US, but the US is heavily spearheading this eugenacist push as part of a broader and systematic attack on human rights and a push for removing civil-rights era gains and protections for marginalized populations, and whatever they do is picked up, slightly modified, and then repackaged by the right wing around the world right now.
You cannot know that your choices will result in increased disease transmission, actively push for policy that will increase disease transmission, and restrict the ability of your citizenry to protect themselves from disease transmission Without Knowingly Weaponizing Them against populations you know will be disproportionately impacted.
That's not a thing. Same as you can't sabotage kid vaccination schedules, punish kids who mask, punish schools that push for vaccine mandates or masks with withdrawal of funding, and Not Expect Children To Die Or Become Disabled. They've just decided they want some children to die. That's a feature. It's just Whose kids die.
Please do not be so committed to thinking of your ideological opponents as foolish and ignorant that you overlook their very real political positioning to achieve goals that serve to reinforce their power base and erode their opposition. They aren't doing this to "own the libs", they're doing it because they have been using policy as a tool to systematically murder predominantly Black, Brown and Indigenous people by the thousands in plain sight and this is yet another extension of that.
I've included a lot of valuable links in there. I entreat that at least some of them be opened and read. These are not controversial concepts.
All the links embedded in this post and then some additional further reading:
https://inequality.org/facts/inequality-and-covid-19/#racial-inequality-covid
Come retribution: Revanchism, settler colonialism, and the geographical imagination of Donald Trump's America
The Risk of Aircraft-Acquired SARS-CoV-2 Transmission during Commercial Flights: A Systematic Review
Global COVID-19 vaccination challenges: Inequity of access and vaccine hesitancy
https://desapublications.un.org/policy-briefs/undesa-policy-brief-70-impact-covid-19-indigenous-peoples
U.S. Military, Sexual Violence, & the API Community Roundtable Discussion Report
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/trump-executive-order-on-homelessness-a-punitive-approach-says-expert/
https://legalclarity.org/does-slavery-still-exist-in-america-what-the-law-says/
https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/the-public-health-implications-of-ice/
Impact of war-associated factors on spread of sexually transmitted infections: a systemic review
https://www.kff.org/other-health/tracking-key-hhs-public-health-policy-actions-under-the-trump-administration/
https://apnews.com/article/cdc-disease-tracking-health-surveillance-554eb9aa20b758714eba8b835dcde856
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_expansionism_under_Donald_Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolitics
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/01/qa-on-trumps-impending-exit-from-the-world-health-organization/
https://berkeleyhighjacket.com/2024/editorial/military-recruiters-target-low-income-students-in-the-us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/trump-eugenics-disability-timeline-genes/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/donald-trump-wants-to-make-eugenics-great-again-lets-not/
https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/home-page/
https://www.who.int/data/inequality-monitor/data
To the best of my knowledge, my post contains solid and verifiable information. If anyone can confirm that one of my sources deploys false claims, or that I have made a claim that is verifiably false, please let me know and I will retract it. I am sorry to add such heavy material to a post that was likely just personal commentary, but as this is a matter of global public health it feels important to provide reading options.
I would also suggest researching as energy levels and capacity to process distressing information allows: the prison industrial complex; the varied uses of denial of medical treatment as a means for population control and collective punishment in institutional settings; and the many and myriad active sabotage efforts of public health as part of the disability industrial complex and how that also reinforces and feeds into the prison industrial complex.
I do not share this information to fill people with despair, but because it is a largely invisible issue unless you keep up with disability advocacy, the Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movement, and migrant and Indigenous justice organizations. Accordingly, those who take in this information and would like to do something to help push back against it: an immediate thing you can do if you aren't already is resume masking, discuss these issues with receptive people in your interpersonal lives, and agitate for public health interventions that are based in science. Support disabled disability advocates and disabled-led advocacy organizations, and actively seek them out to read their primers on policies being instituted by your local and state level governments. Opposing the expansion of military bases and the building of new ones will also help.
Good public health outcomes REQUIRE being anti-racist and pro-disability justice. They require targeting gender based violence with an eye for its elimination. Which is one of the reasons they are being targeted by white supremacist and other supremacist groups. Thank you to everyone who reads through the whole thing.
A draft State Department memo outlines ways the Trump administration may ratchet up pressure on the African country by ending health support
Adding this onto it because like. Well. There it is. This is tactics that all the peoples of the world need to not just passively resist but vocally roar about as best we can. For my part I'm going to be once again contacting numerous government departments and calling for the expulsion of the US ambassador. It won't work, but the act of demonstrating vocal opposition is important. I will also be contacting my local MP's and making it clear that I expect them to take a stand on this.
