The Epoch Times spoke with Meghan Harwood, the wife of the officer in question, Major Nick Harwood. While her husband will soon be separated from the Corps after 15 years of honorable service, Mrs. Harwood said, his case represents an “excellent example of the farce that is the military legal system.”

She said his religious beliefs and Constitutional rights were trampled on, explaining that “he is not being afforded the rights of every other American in this country.” His request for religious accommodation was denied, as well as his subsequent appeal.

Major Harwood was given 48 hours to take the shot after receiving the denial of his appeal in December 2021. “They were trying to force him to violate his religious beliefs,” but according to his wife, “he maintained his religious conviction.”

And as a result, he was relieved of his position and assigned to work elsewhere.

Over six months after the denial of religious accommodation, he met with his Board of Inquiry on July 18. Mrs. Harwood described it as “an administrative court,” one absent the strict legal proceedings of a standard court.

“There’s no judge,” she said. “Instead, there are three high-ranking officers that vote whether to keep him or separate him [from the Marine Corps].”

One of the points the government prosecutor argued, she said, is that when a person joins the military, they also limit their rights. He then tied this point to limiting free speech, giving the example that “you can’t go into work and tell your commanding officer off.” He also tied it to the Second Amendment, noting that “you can’t just bring a gun into some workplaces.”

Both points, according to Mrs. Harwood, are “extremely asinine” examples of limiting someone’s rights.

Limited Testimony

While Major Harwood’s wife was able to testify at his Board of Inquiry, her speech was limited.

“While the prosecutor objected to me testifying for my husband, I was told that I could testify as long as I don’t talk about our religious beliefs,” she explained.

In the end, Major Harwood was charged with “conduct unbecoming of an officer,” as well as multiple counts of failing to obey an order or regulation, according to Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

His wife considers each charge to be an assault on his Constitutional rights, as she said, “Article 90 specifically states that any order that goes against Constitutional or statutory rights is deemed unlawful, [explaining that] they’ve ignored an important Constitutional First Amendment right in the matter—the freedom of religion.”

Mrs. Harwood added that they are violating statutory law under the Religious Freedom Act of 1993.

“The manual for court martials says that the lawfulness of an order is a question of law to be determined by a military judge, but with the Board of Inquiry, no one is standing before a military judge,” she said.

‘Discrimination’

“In my husband’s case,” Mrs. Harwood said, “two of the three board members are commanders, [emphasizing that] they are actually some of the Marines tasked with ordering people to get the shot.” She questions how her husband is receiving a fair trial from three Marines who are vaccinated, while two of the three are giving orders to take the vaccine.

They are also responsible for negatively endorsing religious accommodations, she added.

“If [Major Harwood] was actually able to attend a court martial hearing in front of a military judge,” she said, “he would have more of a fair chance.” And according to Mrs. Harwood, “they know they would lose in an actual court of law.”

Two courts have issued preliminary injunctions barring the Navy and Air Force from punishing servicemembers who have sought religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate.

Major Harwood also submitted for early retirement. His wife said his paperwork was “never forwarded up” the chain of command.

“We were told that they were going to keep it for his board, so that if they were going to separate him, then they could offer him early retirement,” she said, adding that “they never did.”

7 Religious Exemptions

As of July 6, the Marine Corps has approved seven religious exemptions, 602 administrative or medical exemptions, and has separated 3,069 people.

“Why are some afforded their Constitutional right [to freedom of religion] while my husband and thousands of others are not?” Mrs. Harwood questioned. “It’s discrimination and it’s not equal opportunity.”

Others that have been granted administrative or medical exemption “slip through the cracks” in the name of military readiness, she said, adding that her husband has “missed zero days” for a positive COVID test. “All the while,” she said, “others that have been vaccinated have missed many days.”

‘Weakening the Military’

“This is not about the health of a unit or military readiness,” Mrs. Harwood continued. “It’s about discrimination, [and] Christians are being labeled with conduct unbecoming of an officer.”

According to Mrs. Harwood, “our military is single-handedly being dismantled by leaders who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic.”

Rather than supporting and defending the freedom of religion, she said, “senior leaders are choosing to not approve religious accommodations.”

Their decisions are “weakening the military,” she said.

She prays that “our leaders would have the courage to end this mandate before the damage to our military is beyond repair.”

She admitted that her family has “made so many sacrifices” for her husband’s service. “It’s not just a job; it is a lifestyle,” she explained. “We understand Nick’s calling, so we make those sacrifices.”

Today, she is saddened that “the military is not even willing to come to a common ground.”

But when it’s all said and done, she said, her family will continue to “trust in God, knowing that [Major Harwood] could be called [by God] to do something outside the military.”

Mrs. Harwood offered a favorite quote from former president Ronald Reagan to the American people:

“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Marines Corp for comment.

A study out of the United Kingdom has shown that health care workers who received multiple COVID-19 vaccine boosters after initially being infected with the original virus strain from Wuhan are more prone to chronic reinfection from the Omicron variant.

This may help explain why the people who have received several COVID-19 vaccine boosters are increasingly the ones who end up in the hospital with severe COVID-19 symptoms, sometimes resulting in death, said scientist and physician Dr. Robert Malone.

In a July 21 interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program, Malone, an inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, said this phenomenon is the result of a process called “immune imprinting,” whereby initial exposure to a virus strain may prevent the body from producing enough neutralizing antibodies against a newer strain.

He added that this process is reinforced by multiple inoculations.

“All over the world, we are seeing these datasets that show that, unfortunately, the people that are dying and being hospitalized are overwhelmingly the highly vaccinated,” he said. “It is not those that have natural immunity.”

The COVID-19 vaccines currently in circulation are based on the Wuhan strain of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, which causes the illness now identified as COVID-19.

A number of strains have emerged and become dominant since the Wuhan strain was prevalent, including the currently dominant Omicron variant.

The problem is that COVID-19 vaccines use only one of the components of the whole virus, which is a spike protein, so the immune system of a person who received an mRNA vaccine becomes trained to respond to only that component, Malone explained.

“If that antigen has changed slightly, if that virus has changed slightly, [the immune system] still reacts as if it’s the old one,” he said.

The COVID-19 vaccines are based on the spike protein of the original virus identified in Wuhan. That strain of the virus no longer exists and is not circulating in the population anymore, Malone said.

If a vaccine based on a now-defunct viral strain is repeatedly administered, it trains the immune system to focus more and more on the antigen delivered through the vaccine and to disregard anything else that’s slightly different, Malone explained, calling this phenomenon immune imprinting.

“The literature on immune imprinting is bombproof,” Malone said. “Paper after paper after paper now, in the top peer-reviewed journals from the top laboratories all across the world, are documenting it.”

The phenomenon has long been known in the field of vaccinology, said Malone, but the topic is verboten, and people who work in the field prefer not to discuss it, he said.

Vaccine Immunity Versus Natural Immunity

Health care workers in the UK—many of whom were infected with the Wuhan variant of the virus and also received three or four COVID-19 vaccine doses—have been developing chronic repeated infections from the Omicron variant, Malone said, citing a paper published in the academic journal Science.

Another paper published in Nature shows that the evolution of the virus is not coming from the general population, but rather from immunocompromised people who have received multiple vaccine doses, Malone said, and about 30 percent of the highly vaccinated population are having repeated infections.

This is contrary to the promoted narrative that the unvaccinated are putting the wider population at risk, Malone noted.

Natural immunity from a COVID-19 infection lasts for at least 14 months, including immunity against the Omicron strains, Malone said, citing a scientific paper from Qatar which has not yet been peer reviewed (pdf).

Vaccine-induced immunity, however, lasts only a couple of months, he added.

When someone gets infected with the original virus, that person will generate an immune response that includes “all kinds of proteins from the virus,” provided he or she hasn’t experienced too much immune imprinting, Malone explained.

“The problem with these monovalent vaccines, or the single-antigen vaccines, is they’re driving all your immune response against one thing as opposed to the whole virus. So all the virus has to do is genetically, through evolution, tweak a few knobs to escape that,” he said. “And that is exactly what’s happened with Omicron.”

The paradox is that most of the countries with emerging economies and low vaccination rates also have the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates in the world, Malone said.

“It’s likely that we’re going to continue to see this trend,” he said.

According to Our World in Data, only 1.4 percent of Haiti’s population has been vaccinated, and the country has recorded 838 COVID-19 deaths, a rate of 73 deaths per 1 million people.

In South Africa, where 32 percent of the population is vaccinated, there have been nearly 102,000 deaths, a rate of 1,717 deaths per 1 million people.

In the UK, 75 percent of the population is vaccinated, and more than 184,000 people have died, which is a rate of 2,736 deaths per 1 million.

And in the United States, 67 percent of the population is vaccinated, and 1.03 million people have died from the virus, a rate of 3,058 deaths per 1 million people.

Other Problems with Vaccines

Malone pointed out a problem with the current mRNA vaccines.

When a vaccine is injected into a patient’s arm, the RNA from the vaccine, which is a modified RNA, is supposed to last for only a couple of hours, but a study from Stanford University shows that “the RNA sticks around for at least 60 days,” Malone said.

However, the government only accounts for vaccine reactions and illnesses that are recorded on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) within the first couple of weeks after vaccination, even though the drug is still in the body two months later, Malone said.

“The RNA from the vaccine produces more spike protein than the natural infection does,” he said. “Now that makes sense about why we see more adverse events with the vaccines than we see with the infection itself, because spike is a toxin.”

VAERS was established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration to collect and analyze data about the adverse effects of vaccination.

The system relies on individuals to send in reports and is not intended to determine if a reported health problem was caused by a vaccine, but it is “especially useful for detecting unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting that might indicate a possible safety problem with a vaccine,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Malone, president and co-founder of the International Alliance of Physicians and Medical Scientists, said over 17,000 doctors and scientists have signed a declaration stating unequivocally that genetic vaccines need to be withdrawn.

“These genetic vaccines are not working,” he said.

Meiling Lee and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.

In Wisdom is a spirit
intelligent, holy, unique,
Manifold, subtle, agile,
clear, unstained, certain,
Not baneful, loving the good, keen,
unhampered, beneficent, kindly,
Firm, secure, tranquil,
all-powerful, all-seeing,
And pervading all spirits,
though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle.
For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion,
and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity. (Wisdom 7:22-23)