Tom Haviland's Journey

How his email to the Air Force 3-star general got him fired

I hope my readers find Tom Haviland’s story as inspirational as I do.

For new readers, you can read about my connection to Tom here.

Tom, having the courage of his convictions sent an email to an Air Force 3-star general on October 13, 2021. He copied all 30,000 people that worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. This email got him immediately fired from his $165,000 a year job as an independent contractor.

The verbiage from his email which was in response to an email from the Deputy Commander:

To My WPAFB, AFMC, and ACC Coworkers,

I write this and provide the attached document as encouragement to you. I want you to know that “you are not alone” if you feel that you have been wronged by not being allowed to make your own decision on whether to get the Covid-19 vaccines or not. The “mandate” is flat out wrong. The data does not support it, and it is also morally wrong. It is sinister of our government to insist that you get the vaccine or else lose your job and other civil rights.

I understand that many of you are “between a rock and a hard place.” You don’t want to get the vaccine, but you feel that you are in no position to say “no” because you really need your job to support you and your family. However, there comes a point when we need to make a stand against tyranny. Telling you that you MUST inject an experimental vaccine into your body is about as bad as it gets.

I encourage all of you to dig deep inside you and find that courage that is within all of us. I cannot make your decision for you, and I cannot guarantee that we will win. But I do know that if enough of us stand, then they will rescind this awful mandate. Some in leadership have tried to give the impression that almost everyone has no problems getting the vaccine and that you are “the odd ball out” if you are vaccine hesitant. Let me tell you right now that is the furthest thing from the truth.

How do I know this? Some of you at WPAFB may have seen me lately. I am the guy that spent my two-week vacation in September and the first two weekends in October at the stoplight on Fairfield Road by the Red Lobster just off I-675, holding the sign saying “NO VAX MANDATE.” For the eighteen days (over 100 hours) that I have been out there, I estimate that I have watched over 100,000 cars go by me.

Sure, many of the cars don’t do anything, and about 1% will give me a “middle finger” or say “F you.” But a significant number, about 20%, cheer wildly, honk their horns, or give me a “thumbs up.”

What is interesting is to see that when most of the cars are stopped at the light awaiting their turn to go, when the first car starts to honk it gives courage to the other drivers to start honking their horns. Soon, many cars are letting the entire intersection know exactly how they feel about this rotten mandate. Furthermore, every single day that I have been there, people (including doctors, nurses, teachers, clergy, firemen, etc.) have taken the time to park their car and walk down to the corner to shake my hand or offer me a bottle of water.

I know that the stated work policy of “not asking people about their vaccination status” has been to protect your medical privacy. But I think that it has also had the consequence of “isolating” each one of us so that we can never talk to our fellow coworkers about how we really feel about things like masks, social distancing, and vaccine mandates. We were never really allowed to talk about these things together, so we never really had the opportunity to start “honking our horns together” if we disagreed with any policy.

Again, for those of you who despise this vaccine mandate, I want you to know that you are not alone. As for me, I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

Sincerely,

Tom Haviland (20 Year USAF Veteran, 16 Year Defense Contractor)

P.S. For Lt Gen Schaefer: You should be ashamed of yourself. You failed us. Instead of fighting for our right to choose for ourselves whether to get injected with an experimental vaccine, you spent your time trying to “guilt” us who are unvaccinated into getting the vaccine. Shame on you.

From: SCHAEFER, CARL E Lt Gen USAF AFMC AFMC/CD <carl.schaefer@us.af.mil>

Sent: Friday, October 8, 2021 12:07 PM

Subject: AFMC Vaccination Total Force Requirements

10/16/21, 8:36 AM AT&T Yahoo Mail - RE: AFMC Vaccination Total Force Requirements

Team,

As the Deputy Secretary of Defense recently stated, “To defend the Nation and protect the American people, we need a healthy and ready Total Force.” To accomplish this, the Secretary of Defense directed mandatory vaccination of Service members against COVID-19 by signing the memorandum, "Mandatory Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccination of Department of Defense Service Members," on 24 August 2021. On 9 September 2021, the President of the United States (POTUS) announced a pair of executive orders that mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for Federal civilians and employees of federal contractors. These three documents provide direction on how AFMC can accomplish the POTUS vaccine mandate.

These documents also provide key dates that I want to ensure you are aware of:

Military: Active Duty military members must be fully vaccinated by 2 November 2021. Air Reserve Component/Air National Guard members have until 2 December 2021.

Civilians: DoD civilian employees must be fully vaccinated by 22 November 2021, subject to exemptions as required by law.

Employees are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after completing the second dose of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine or two weeks after receiving a single dose of a one-dose COVID-19 vaccine. The following deadlines are provided in order to be fully vaccinated by 22 November 2021:

11 October: first dose deadline (if receiving the Moderna vaccine)

18 October: first dose deadline (if receiving the Comirnaty/Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine)

8 November: second dose deadline (if receiving the Moderna and Comirnaty/Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines)

8 November: first (only) dose deadline (if receiving the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine)

Contractors: Covered contractors must be fully vaccinated by 8 December 2021. Compliance for contractor employees is the responsibility of the respective contractor. Contractor employees should check with their employer on the requirement to be vaccinated.

Information regarding ways to obtain the vaccine may be found here:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/How- Do-I-Get-a-COVID-19-Vaccine.html

Information regarding different types of vaccines can be found at the following CDC website at https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/index.html or by contacting your health care provider.

Air Force Medical Service provides an informative overview of many of the myths associated with the vaccines:

https://www.airforcemedicine.af.mil/News/Display/Article/2785713/myths-and-facts-about-the-vax-debunking-common-covid-19-vaccine-myths/

I encourage you to keep yourselves informed.

Additional execution guidance is forthcoming from Headquarters Air Force. We anticipate this will address implementation for our civilian employees, from submitting religious or medical exemptions to proving vaccination status.

Unfortunately, the very real impacts of COVID-19 have affected people and families across the command. We’ve lost a number of unvaccinated AFMC members in the last three weeks. Losing even one person is too many. While we should be sensitive to the choices people make, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to help keep our Airmen safe and our missions operating during the COVID-19 pandemic.

V/R,

Schaef

_________________________________

CARL E. SCHAEFER, Lt Gen, USAF

Deputy Commander, AFMC

Tom attached a document to this email, “Why I Will Not Comply With the Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate”.

The verbiage from that document:

Why I Will NOT COMPLY With the Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate

I, Thomas F. Haviland, a free American citizen, will NOT COMPLY with the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for two reasons: 1) the data does not support me getting the vaccine, and 2) it is morally wrong for the government to demand that I get injected with an experimental vaccine against my will, or else lose my rights as a free citizen.

1) The Data Does Not Support Me Getting the Vaccine

The U.S. Government has not done a very good job of publishing Covid-19 case national statistics that are up to date and broken down by age and vaccination status. Fortunately, there are other sources that can give us insight as to what is actually happening. One of those reliable sources is Public Health England that releases an updated “Technical Briefing” every two weeks or so. The current update as of this writing is “Public Health England Technical Briefing 23,” dated 17 Sep 2021. You can easily find it online. Another reason that I chose England is because their overall vaccination rate is very similar to our U.S. vaccination rate.

Please refer to Table 5 on Pages 19-20 of “PHE Technical Briefing 23.” You’ll see that England has had 593,572 cases of the Delta variant reported during the period 1 Feb 21 through 12 Sep 21 affecting both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons. What may surprise you is that the 257,357 cases affecting unvaccinated persons resulted in only 722 deaths. That is a Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of 0.0028 or 0.28% for the unvaccinated. Interestingly, during the same period, Table 5 shows that the 157,400 cases affecting fully vaccinated persons resulted in 1,613 deaths. That is a CFR of 0.0102 or 1.02% for the fully vaccinated.

My point with the above data is not to “bash” those who have decided to get the vaccine. Your personal health choice is YOUR business. But the data above, combined with my personal situation (age, health status, etc.) have logically led me to a different decision that it is best for me NOT to get the vaccine, given the extremely low CFR for the unvaccinated.

The current data also DOES NOT support the argument that “the unvaccinated are being selfish because they are taking up hospital beds and putting others in danger.” Again, referring to Table 5 of “PHE Technical Briefing 23,” of the 12,407 Delta cases that required at least an overnight hospital stay, 6,303 of those persons (51%) were unvaccinated. The other half of those 12,407 cases requiring a hospital stay were either partially or fully vaccinated persons. So the claim that it’s largely the unvaccinated that are taking up all of the hospital beds is false.

Furthermore, it has not been confirmed that the unvaccinated are any more dangerous than the vaccinated in terms of being able to spread the virus. A recent English study, led by the Office for National Statistics, the Department for Health and Social Care, and the University of Oxford, found that the virus levels (i.e., viral load) in a fully vaccinated person who has contracted the Delta variant can be just as high as those of a person who has not had a vaccination. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 2 Aug 2021 article entitled, “New Data on Covid-19 Transmission by Vaccinated Individuals” states that the CDC has released a similar finding that the vaccinated can carry similar viral loads as the unvaccinated, and can therefore transmit the virus.

A CDC online page entitled, “Science Brief: Covid-19 Vaccines and Vaccination,” as recently as 15 Sep 21 states, “Infections with the Delta variant in vaccinated persons potentially have reduced transmissibility than infections in unvaccinated persons, although additional studies are needed.” Thus, the CDC admits that there is currently no proof that unvaccinated persons with Covid-19 are putting others in danger any more than vaccinated persons with breakthrough cases of Covid-19. And, as the data in Table 5 of “PHE Technical Briefing 23” shows, there are just as many breakthrough cases of the Delta variant in England (about 280,000) amongst partially or fully vaccinated persons as there are cases of Delta amongst vaccinated persons (257,357) for the period 1 Feb 21 through 12 Sep 21. So it may be just as likely that you catch Covid-19 from a vaccinated person as from an unvaccinated person whether you live in England or the USA, and the “transmissibility argument” falls apart.

2) It is Morally Wrong for the Government to Demand that I Get Injected with an Experimental Vaccine Against My Will, or Else Lose My Rights as a Citizen.

Do I really need to explain this, here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave?” This mandate goes against everything at our core, with a government meant to serve (not rule) the people using “individual liberty” (not safety) as its highest guiding principle. The nations including the U.S. that put together the Nuremberg Code, used at the end of WWII to try Nazi scientists for medical experimentation on Jews, recognized the importance of individual liberty. Let me quote you a few paragraphs from the Nuremberg Code:

QUOTE

Permissible Medical Experiments -- The great weight of the evidence before us is to the effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts: 1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

UNQUOTE

Now I understand that our scientists are trying not to conduct any cruel experiments as they search for ways to protect us from Covid-19. But make no mistake about it, regardless of whether the Covid-19 vaccines are “FDA approved” or not, we are still in an “experimental” stage with these vaccines. Do you want proof? Think about how the experts keep moving the goalposts. First you were told that if you got fully vaccinated, you were pretty much immune to Covid-19, could take off your mask forever, and not worry about giving it to others. Then you were told that you still could catch the virus after all and give it to others, but that your case probably won’t be as severe. Now you are being told that you probably better “mask up” again until you get a booster shot, but that will probably do the trick. Meanwhile, Canada just contracted with Pfizer to provide booster shots for the next 4 years. Oh, and let’s not forget that this is the first time we have used mRNA technology in mass on humans, so we really don’t know what the long-term side effects will be.

Go back and look at the quote from the Nuremberg Code. Do you really have “sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements” of the Covid-19 vaccine to make “an enlightened decision?” Do you know the “duration” of this experiment (i.e., how many booster shots you will eventually need/get), or “all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected” (i.e., long-term side effects)? There have already been two “pauses” of the distribution of the vaccines due to unanticipated serious side effects, one FDA/CDC pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in April 2021 due to a severe type of blood clot that develops in women within two weeks after getting the vaccine, and an October 2021 pause by Sweden, Finland, and Denmark of the Moderna vaccine for younger persons ages 30 and below due to an increased chance of developing myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) after getting the vaccine. It’s pretty clear that none of us know the answers to all of the above questions at this point in time, not even the experts. Nor were many of you informed that these issues even existed at the time you volunteered to get one of the vaccines.

Therefore, with so many “unknowns,” I submit that it is unethical and morally wrong for the government to demand that I get injected with any of these particular Covid-19 vaccines that could potentially be harmful to me, with little benefit given an already extremely low Case Fatality Rate for the unvaccinated, under the threat of taking away my civil liberties if I do not comply. To state it simply, this Covid-19 vaccine mandate is “tyranny.”

I will not comply.

Thomas F. Haviland 20 Year USAF Veteran 16 Year Defense Contractor

thomashaviland@sbcglobal.net

It is important to note that Tom did not receive a SINGLE reply from ANYONE to his email.

One could look at this as an unfortunate ending to a very long, lucrative career, but I feel certain that Tom looks upon this event as a defining moment in his life. A moment that was divinely appointed. A moment that gave him the opportunity to completely immerse himself in this fight for truth - in this literal fight for our lives and the lives of those we love and cherish.

Tom is a God-fearing, brave and tenacious warrior. I have the utmost respect for him.

When Tom stands before God one day, I feel certain He will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

“His lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.”

Matthew 25:21 KJV