WASHINGTON: The Pentagon will seek to make coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops “no later” than the middle of next month, the Biden administration announced on Monday.
Officials initially said the shots could be required by the end of August to help stop the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.
But they decided to wait, bowing to concerns expressed by White House officials about putting a mandate in place for troops before the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval for the vaccine.
The secretary of defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, said in a memo to the staff on Monday that he would seek to speed up a mandate if the F.D.A. approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before the middle of September, which the agency aims to do.
In the meantime, he told the services to begin preparing the force for mandatory vaccinations.
But the middle of September is more than five weeks away, and even then, the administration has not put a deadline in place for when troops must be fully vaccinated.
The decision to delay is the latest shift in the Biden administration’s response to the surging Delta variant.
President Biden has expressed frustration with the vaccination rate around the nation and urged the private sector and state and local governments to step up pressure on the unvaccinated.
But he has repeatedly passed on ordering troops as their commander in chief to be injected with vaccines that have not been fully approved by the F.D.A.