Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has an Army doctor in his department investigating whether COVID vaccines killed troops.
According to a Thursday Politico article, Army physician Theresa Long testified in a federal court in Virginia that she is now working alongside Kennedy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to examine whether service members died from COVID shots that were mandated under President Joe Biden in 2021.
Hegseth assigned her to serve as Kennedy's senior medical military adviser, a role at the HHS that had not surfaced publicly until now, according to Politico.
Long said in an August 14 deposition that she is reviewing whether 2,544 deaths among troops, figures reported to a federal vaccine-injury database but never verified, can be tied to the shot, Politico reported. She told the court she hoped to wrap up her research within roughly a year.
Kennedy, a longtime skeptic of vaccine safety, has repeatedly attacked the COVID vaccines, once branding them the "most deadly vaccines in history," Politico noted. Public health experts have said his characterization is false and warn it has pushed some Americans away from shots that can blunt the disease.
Much of Long's task centers on claims that the mRNA formulas from Pfizer and Moderna raise the risk of heart inflammation, according to Politico. 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, according to Politico. She claimed that 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 was barred from saying more, Politico reported.