Then again, all the hubbub may be little more than bad p.r. Despite an embarrassing congressional investigation in February which concluded that the Pentagon irresponsibly rushed into requiring the vaccine, TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson notes that the program hasn't hurt recruitment. "Plainly it's something people think about," he said, referring to soldiers' fears of the vaccine. "But it really hasn't caught fire yet as a cause clbre. The Pentagon's position is still that nobody's gotten really sick because of it, and the truth is that the numbers show that very few people are impacted at all by the vaccine."
The numbers, actually, are hard to come by. The Pentagon says that roughly 100 soldiers have experienced slight side effects. Congress puts the number at over 400. Some soldiers' rights groups put the figure in the thousands. No matter how you slice it, considering that more than a half million soldiers have been inoculated, the percentage who report side effects is fairly small. Still, the horror stories have become folklore in the boot camps, and, orders or no orders, it's hard to blame someone for not wanting one of the world's most dreaded infectious diseases introduced into their system.