Two doctors swore out testimony about the same vaccine mandate this summer. Both signed under penalty of perjury. Both filings sit in the same federal case file in Alexandria, Virginia, five weeks apart.
One of them was asked how many service members suffered myocarditis before she signed the memo that made the mandate operational.
A. I was informed there were 23.
The other is currently tasked with investigating 55,000 adverse event reports filed on members of the U.S. Armed Forces — including 2,544 deaths.
Twenty-three, and fifty-five thousand. Same mandate. Same courthouse. Same season.
Credit where it is owed: Catherine Herridge surfaced the second document — the July 2026 affidavit of LTC Theresa Long — and put the numbers in front of the public. I would not be writing this without her reporting. What follows is what sits underneath it.
“Put Her Under Oath”
On September 14, 2026 — five years to the day after the memo — Congressman Andy Harris put out a release with a headline that reads like a long grievance finally losing its patience: “Five years after the Adirim mandatory vaccine memo, put her under oath.”
Harris is a physician, and he wrote like one who has had enough:
“I know the difference between a clinical recommendation and an order with a discharge packet attached… I would never tell a healthy infantryman his career depended on an EUA vial… Our Warriors deserve the truth. Put her under oath.“
Here is the thing nobody seems to have noticed.
It already happened. On August 12, 2026, in a conference room in Fairfax, Virginia, Terry Alayne Adirim, M.D. — the Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs who signed that memo — sat down, was sworn, and answered questions about it for 127 pages.
Thirty-three days before Harris asked for it.
Not in a hearing room. Not because of a subpoena, a FOIA suit, or an Inspector General. Because she sued somebody.
How a Defamation Case Became the Only Real Deposition
Adirim was fired from the CIA in 2025, where she served in the Center for Global Health Services. She sued — the Agency, Director John Ratcliffe, and Ivan Raiklin, who had put her on what he calls his “Deep State Target List.”
The government defendants are gone. The CIA and Ratcliffe were dismissed on February 25, 2026. What survived is narrow: defamation per se, against Raiklin alone, over things he said on the Roseanne Barr podcast. A jury hears it on January 19, 2027.
And here is the mechanism that produced documents nobody in Congress could pry loose:
Truth is a defense to defamation.
Raiklin said, in substance, that she signed the memo that institutionalized an unlawful mandate. To defend that, he gets to prove it. Which means his counsel, John McGavin, got to walk Adirim through the entire mandate record under oath — and his expert got to put the casualty data in a sworn declaration.
She sued for her reputation. She got discovery about the mandate.
The Memo
Exhibit 9. McGavin establishes it plainly:
Q. Exhibit 9 is a September 14, 2021 memo or directive or recommendation from you. Is that correct?
A. Yes.
Then the question the mandate’s entire legal architecture turns on:
Q. In this document, you make no reference to any side effects or risks. Is that correct?
A. That was not the point of the memorandum.
Q. My question is correct. There’s nothing listed in this memo.
A. Not in this memorandum, no.
He presses. Did she ever issue any such warning, anywhere? She goes to the handouts — the site of administration, CDC and FDA guidance, the paperwork someone hands you at a folding table. He will not take it.
Q. Okay, but my question is pretty simple. Did you?
A. No, I did not.
Twenty-Three
Ask what she knew, and you get a number.
Q. So, what were the numbers of individuals or service members who suffered myocarditis from the time of implementation of the vaccine until you issued your memo in September of 2021?
A. I was informed there were 23.
Q. During that entire time?
A. That was what was reported to me, and what I can recall, yes.
Twenty-three. Across the entire force, across the entire rollout, up to the day she signed. Asked how many more accumulated between spring and September: “I don’t know.”
Q. You didn’t investigate that?
A. It was not reported to me if there were any more cases. I don’t recall. I mean, that was five years ago.
Deposition of Terry Adirim, August 12, 2026, transcript p. 66.
To be fair to her, she gives her reasoning, and it is the reasoning of the entire era:
A. I did read those studies and trusted the regulatory agency that made the decision about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
And when confronted with criticism of the underlying safety analysis: “I’m not aware of that. If there was concern by the FDA, they wouldn’t have approved it.”
That is the whole apparatus in one sentence. Nobody checked, because somebody else had checked.
The Part About the Vials
This is the exchange I would put on the front page.
For five years the official line was that the EUA-labeled Pfizer-BioNTech product and licensed Comirnaty were interchangeable — that the distinction service members kept raising was a lawyer’s trick, a way to dodge a shot. Adirim’s memo is the document that made that interchangeability operational.
Now read what she says under oath about the follow-on memo:
A. I do recall that we had discussions about ensuring that if somebody declined the EUA vaccine, that the Defense Health Agency, which I oversaw, would provide those lot numbers that met the BLA.
And again, describing the same effort:
A. …vials that are the legal covered under the BLA could be sent to where service members who refused the Pfizer-BioNTech and said they preferred the Comirnaty.
Deposition of Terry Adirim, transcript p. 93 — the Defense Health Agency and the BLA lot numbers, in her own words.
Sit with that. The Department was quietly arranging to route BLA-compliant lots to the people who refused the EUA product — which means the distinction was real, was understood at the top, and was being accommodated internally at the same moment troops were being told it did not exist and processed for refusing.
The Other Affidavit
Which brings us to what Herridge found.
Filed September 17 as Defendant’s Exhibit 1 in Raiklin’s summary judgment motion: the sworn declaration of Theresa M. Long, M.D., LTC, U.S. Army Medical Corps — flight surgeon, aviation safety officer, and currently Senior Medical Military Advisor to the Secretary of HHS. Executed July 21, 2026.
Be straight about what it is: Long was engaged by Raiklin as a paid expert witness, and she says so in the declaration itself. That is disclosed, it is normal, and you should know it. It is also not a reason to ignore a flight surgeon describing bodies.
Her core passage, verbatim:
“While establishing definitive causation in every case is complex, the existence of these safety signals, combined with known risks such as myocarditis in young males, means that claims of vaccine-related harm cannot be dismissed as having no medical basis.… I have first hand knowledge of over 29 deaths of servicemembers after vaccination with the COVID-19 vaccines. I am currently tasked with investigating the 55,000 vaccine adverse event reports filed on individuals identified as members of the U.S. Armed Forces, this includes 2544 deaths.”
Declaration of Theresa M. Long, M.D., LTC, U.S. Army Medical Corps — filed September 17, 2026 as Defendant’s Exhibit 1, page 7. Surfaced by Catherine Herridge.
Note her care. She does not say 2,544 people were killed by a vaccine. She says there are 2,544 deaths inside a body of reports she has been assigned to investigate, and that causation in any individual case is complex. That is a careful witness, and the precision is the point — it is what makes the rest land.
Then she gets specific, because she was there:
“As the first aviation brigade surgeon I had one servicemember die of rapid onset and progression of esophageal cancer after COVID vaccination and one in which a student pilot who had never been COVID positive, who experienced sudden cardiac death at the controls of a helicopter during a training flight. An independent cardiologist evaluated all imaging, labs and history on the student pilot and determined that myocardial injury secondary to the COVID-19 vaccines was the most likely cause.“
A student pilot. At the controls. During a training flight.
Long also puts a document on the record that deserves its own article: the FDA Purple Book. She declares that searches from September 2021 through 2026 for Comirnaty return “No biosimilar data at this time” and “No interchangeable data(s) at this time” — and concludes the Purple Book never listed the BioNTech product as interchangeable with, or even biosimilar to, Comirnaty. She attaches the screenshots.
That is the federal government’s own registry of interchangeability, saying the word “interchangeable” was never there.
And she states the legal conclusion the defense needs: Raiklin’s characterizations “have a substantial basis in the medical evidence and epidemiological findings.”
The Text She Never Saw
Back in the deposition, McGavin reads a Fauci text from the Johnson–Paul release, dated January 25, 2021 — many people have significant cytokine reactions and fever after the second dose, and this “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester.”
Q. Never had this information?
A. No.
Q. You never investigated that possibility?
A. It’s hard to investigate a negative when I —
Q. The answer is you never did investigate it.
A. No, I didn’t because I wasn’t aware of it.
Deposition of Terry Adirim, transcript p. 95.
She never spoke to Fauci. Never had an email from him. Never had a text. She points to two later Department reports — July 2025 and March 2026 — and a Uniformed Services University systematic review, none of which found miscarriage attributable to the vaccine. That is her answer and it belongs here.
But the sequence stands on its own. In January 2021, the most powerful health official in the country privately flags a theoretical miscarriage signal. In September 2021, the official mandating the product for every service member in uniform has never heard of it.
The Committee That Never Called Her
Exhibit 5 is Ron Johnson’s report — “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” April 29, 2026.
Q. Have you been interviewed by the committee?
A. No.
Q. Have you been asked to come in and testify?
A. No.
A Senate investigation titled Unmasked, about officials turning a blind eye to safety signals, that never interviewed the woman who signed the memo.
That one is not her failure. That one belongs to us.
What This Is, and What It Isn’t
I want to be careful, and I’d ask you to be careful when you share it.
Nothing in this case has been decided. This is discovery and motion practice, not findings of fact. The CIA and Ratcliffe are out. The only live claim is Adirim’s defamation claim against Raiklin — and she may well win it. A jury could conclude that what he said about her crossed the line regardless of what the memo did. Trial is January 19, 2027. Report the docket, not a verdict that does not exist.
Adirim’s defense is on the record too: she trusted the FDA, she was told the myocarditis cases were mild and recoverable, the departmental reviews found no miscarriage signal, and VAERS — as she correctly notes — is not a causation system.
And Long’s declaration is an advocate’s filing. Critics have already called its claims dubious and unsubstantiated. Some of the material she cites — particularly her reading of Pfizer’s post-authorization pregnancy data — is contested on the denominators, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Take the parts that are hers: the DMED analysis she has testified to before the Senate, the pilot she lost, the Purple Book screenshots.
But here is what cannot be walked back. For five years, the people who lost careers over that memo asked for one thing: put her under oath. Congressman Harris was still asking on the memo’s fifth anniversary, thirty-three days after it had already happened.
She has been under oath since August 12. The transcript is public. It is 127 pages, it sits on a public docket in the Eastern District of Virginia, and it exists for one reason — she went to court to protect her name, and the law made her answer for the memo on the way in.
Twenty-three, she was told.
Fifty-five thousand reports are now on somebody’s desk.
Case No. 1:25-cv-00768-MSN-WBP (E.D. Va., Alexandria Division). Deposition of Terry Alayne Adirim, August 12, 2026. Declaration of Theresa M. Long, M.D., LTC, USA, executed July 21, 2026, filed September 17, 2026 as Defendant’s Exhibit 1 to ECF 80. Trial set January 19, 2027. Hat tip to Catherine Herridge, who broke the Long affidavit.
Thanks for the update, Justin. Maybe this information will prompt more lawsuits, (and discovery.)
Can families or members sue the military for wrongful death or injury?
Between what's available now and the soon-to-be-done (hopefully) VAERS analysis by LTC Long, it seems like there would be enough data to tie those deaths and injuries to the jab order in a civil court.