On Tuesday, a federal judge denied Republican Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt’s request for a preliminary injunction to halt the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for his state’s National Guard troops.
In a 29-page decision, Judge Stephen Friot of the U.S. District Court for Oklahoma’s Western District ruled that the lawsuit brought by Stitt, Attorney General John O’Connor and 16 unnamed individual Oklahoma Air National Guard members “are without merit.”
Friot wrote that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate is just one of nine vaccines that all service members are already required to take and that the COVID-19 vaccine is intended to protect service members from a virus that has killed in two years more Americans “than have been killed in action in all of the wars the United States has ever fought.”
“The court is required to decide the case on the basis of federal law, not common sense,” Friot wrote. “But, either way, the result would be the same.”
