An Army physician has been installed at the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate whether COVID-19 vaccines caused deaths among U.S. service members, according to a Thursday Politico report.

Army doctor Theresa Long testified in a federal court in Virginia that she is now working alongside HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to examine whether troops died from COVID shots that were mandated under President Joe Biden in 2021. The Pentagon's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which was rescinded in January 2023 after Congress moved to end it, had required service members to be vaccinated or face separation from the military. Hegseth assigned Long to serve as Kennedy's senior medical military adviser — a role at HHS that had not surfaced publicly until now, according to Politico. Long is a flight surgeon who previously drew public attention in 2022 when she testified before a Wisconsin state Senate committee raising concerns about vaccine side effects in aviators.

In an August 14 deposition, Long said she is reviewing whether 2,544 deaths among service members, figures that were reported to a federal vaccine-injury database but never verified, can be tied to the vaccine. That database, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), accepts unverified reports from anyone and its entries are not by themselves confirmation that a vaccine caused an injury or death. She told the court she hoped to complete her research within roughly a year.

Kennedy, a longtime skeptic of vaccine safety, has repeatedly attacked the COVID vaccines, at one point branding them the "most deadly vaccines in history," Politico noted. Public health experts have said that characterization is false and warn it has pushed some Americans away from shots that can blunt the disease. Large-scale studies in the United States and other countries have found COVID-19 vaccination to be associated with a small, transient increase in heart-inflammation risk, particularly in young males, while the disease itself carries a higher myocarditis risk.

Much of Long's assignment centers on claims that the mRNA formulas from Pfizer and Moderna raise the risk of heart inflammation. However, a 2026 Pentagon report cited by Politico found that while myocarditis and pericarditis cases ticked up soon after vaccination, the effect was "not sustained over a 1-year period." The Pentagon report noted no deaths.

Long testified that she remained doubtful of the military's own data, which at one point appeared to show the vaccine performing extraordinarily well. She claimed officials inflated the numbers until it "made it look like the vaccine had, like, cured everything," according to a transcript of her testimony reviewed by Politico.

She added that she knew of 28 people who died because of the COVID vaccine but said she was barred from saying more, Politico reported.

Source: Raw Story | Politico