Tucker Carlson says US military vaccine mandate is targeting ‘men with high testosterone’

Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has made several bizarre claims over the US military’s mandatory vaccination policy, saying it targets “men with high testosterone.”

Mr Carlson, on his show on Monday, continued an ongoing crusade against mandatory vaccinations and hit out at Secretary of Defence LLoyd Austin. He claimed the policy was a “new political purity test” by Mr Austin that targeted “sincere Christians” and “freethinkers.”

In August, the Pentagon ordered all active-duty military members to be fully vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, days after the US Food and Drug Administration granted it full approval.

“To this day, only 46 members of the entire US military died from the coronavirus over the last year and a half,” said Mr Carlson.

He then compared suicides to Covid, making the claim that the former killed “many, many times more [than coronavirus]” in the military.

“In just a few months last year, 156 service members killed themselves. So military suicide is an actual crisis the Pentagon might want to address,” he said.

Mr Carlson then brought in another new angle to his criticism, hinting at a conspiracy involving “Satanism.”

“The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the freethinkers, the men with high testosterone levels and anyone else who doesn’t love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately,” he said.

“It’s a takeover of the US military,” he said and called the vaccine mandate “horrifying”.

“If you loved the country, you would not do this.”

As evidence for the unfounded claims, Mr Carlson pointed to a slide he claimed to have taken from a US army PowerPoint presentation.

The slide, which reportedly addressed vaccine hesitancy among servicemen, was termed by Mr Carlson as a “sympathetic portrayal of Satanism.”

“How many children were sacrificed to Satan because of the vaccine?” said a question in the slide, something which Mr Carlson acknowledged was “apparently sarcastically” written, before adding that it also included the “tenets of Satanism.”

“So here you have the United States Army doing PR For satanists,” he said.

“The presentation then proceeds to list the so-called ‘tenets of Satanism’, which are taken straight from the ‘temple of Satanism’ website,” he said, making another bizarre claim.

The slide also mentioned just three people died from taking the Covid vaccine, something Mr Carlson called “dishonest.”

“Reports collected by the Biden administration itself indicate is actually in the thousands,” he said, without specifying which reports he was referring to.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website has pointed out that its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) received 7,653 reports of deaths among those who were vaccinated between 14 December 2020 and 13 September 2021.

This number comprises 0.0020 per cent of the people who received the vaccination, according to the CDC. More than 380 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines were administered for this time period.

“Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem,” it said.