US scraps mandatory flu jabs for soldiers, but what do other militaries do?

With one social media post,1 a vaccine mandate that had been in place for 70 years was cancelled. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, who styles himself “secretary of war,” declared that US military personnel would no longer be obliged to undergo seasonal flu vaccination.A mandatory jab was “just overly broad and not rational,” Hegseth said in a video posted to X on 21 April 2026. Allowing members of the armed forces to choose whether to have the vaccine would give them “medical autonomy” and would pose “no threat” to military readiness, he said.The US first introduced mandatory flu vaccination for military personnel in 1945, partly in response to the number of flu casualties among service personnel during the first world war, when nearly as many were killed by the virus as in combat.2 Seven million personnel were quickly vaccinated as a result.That mandate was rescinded in 1949, when it…