Guantánamo Bay detainees will be offered Covid vaccines to move forward with war crimes hearings

The prosecutor in the case against five Guantánamo Bay prisoners who stand accused of taking part in plotting the attacks on 11 September 2001 wrote a letter to defence lawyers saying that the Pentagon plans to offer Covid vaccines to the 40 prisoners at the facility starting as early as next week.

The prosecutor, Clayton Trivett, wrote “that an official in the Pentagon has just signed a memo approving the delivery of the Covid-19 vaccine to the detainee population in Guantánamo," according to The New York Times.

The memo that gave the green light to vaccinate the prisoners at the detention camp was signed on Wednesday by the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, Dr Terry Adirim.

Vaccinations of the 6,000 residents on the adjacent naval base began on 8 January, including the 1,500 military personnel tasked with overseeing the detention camp. The Trump administration had not previously stated whether prisoners at the camp would be inoculated.

Mr Trivett said that prisoners could start to receive the first of two doses on Monday "on a voluntary basis," The New York Times reported.

Consent is required according to the Pentagon's own policy as the Food and Drug Administration has only granted use of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines on an emergency basis. It's unclear how many Covid cases there have been in Guantánamo Bay. Two cases were reported in the early stages of the pandemic. Both of them were thought to be sailors, but the Defence Department then stopped the disclosure of more specific data. Reuters reported on March 26, 2020, that the military decided to stop reporting detailed data on how Covid was spreading among its troops because of concern that the information could be used by enemies.

Read more: Follow live updates on the Biden administration

Unvaccinated detainees have been among the issues halting war crimes hearings. An army judge has scheduled the formal charging of three defendants for 22 February. The three prisoners are accused of plotting terror attacks in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003. The prisoners could get their second doses the day before their arraignment, which would be the first at the base's war court since 2014.

Encep Nurjaman, who goes by the name of Hambali, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin were captured in Thailand in 2003 and have been in American custody ever since.

The Indonesian Mr Hambali is the former leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group in Southeast Asia, which became a subsidiary of Al Qaeda before the attacks on 11 September, 2001.

The two other prisoners come from Malaysia and stand accused of assisting Mr Hambali in a Bali nightclub bombing in 2002, in which 202 people died, and a Marriott hotel bombing in the Indonesian capital Jakarta the following year, which killed 11 and injured at least 80 people.

Attorneys for some of the detainees said that they would need to consult with their clients by letter concerning whether they were going to accept the offers of vaccination.