Catherine Herridge’s LA Times series puts Brianne Dressen and former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield on the record about injured U.S. service members, rare duty findings, and a compensation system Dressen calls built to fail.

September 26, 2026

“No one left behind”

...is the line the armed forces teach their own, and the one movies and books have repeated until the country can say it in its sleep. On tape in Catherine Herridge’s Straight to the Point, soldier Karoline Stancik says that is not what happened to her after the COVID vaccine. “I was left behind and trampled.”

Herridge’s June 11 episode for LA Times Studios — titled COVID Vaccine Mandate Betrayal — runs about 20 minutes.

They followed the order. Then the floor dropped out.

Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield tells Herridge the Biden-era military mandate had “no scientific justification whatsoever.” The young troops who took it anyway — the ones he says had the strongest immune systems and the least need of the shot — show up at the VA saying the injury began within hours or days of the dose. What they get, Dressen says, is not a workup. It is a mental-health referral. Combat PTSD is real; this, she says, is a second injury: being told the first one is in their heads. Paperwork is how the military decides who counts. She has seen the rare “in line of duty” memo that finally names the vaccine only twice — across hundreds, if not thousands, of cases. Drew spent six months in a hospital and three years getting out of a wheelchair after Guillain-Barré. His Army medical retirement, Herridge reports, is silent on the vaccine. Stancik, whose heart attacks and stroke were catastrophic enough to force a memo, still owes the VA $28,000.

Dressen did not come to that accounting as a detached advocate. The denial, the misdiagnosis, the empty file — that is also her life. Hearing it from service members who believed the institution would catch them is what she says put her on camera, and what built React19. “The only reason I’m public is not because of my injury. It’s because of what’s happened after my injury.”

She is not a late convert to skepticism. On this tape she says she was a “true-blue Democrat” who voted for Biden the day before her shot, a preschool teacher and mother of two, married to a PhD chemist — “science-loving, health-loving people that want to take care of our community.” She enrolled in a U.S. clinical trial before authorization. One dose, November 4, 2020. Within an hour, burning and tingling that, five and a half years later, she says has never left her body. The NIH diagnosed post-vaccine neuropathy. The CICP — the only federal payout window she can point to — rejected her anyway: no causal link, NIH file and all. A 98.5 percent rejection rate. Average check, once the death outliers are pulled out: $4,000. Seven thousand claims still sitting since 2021 and 2022. The programs that were supposed to catch people who did as they were told, she says, were “set up from the beginning to fail good Americans.”

No one left behind is a promise.

On this tape, the people who kept it are the ones still waiting to be written into their own files. The lines below are time-stamped to the YouTube cut.

0:44

2:26

3:10

5:14

8:49

10:13

~11:00

12:50

~14:00

~16:20

16:55

18:20

19:04

Watch the episode

LA Times Studios, June 11, 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=N2FcuwEDvBU

Herridge’s post with chapter list: x.com/C__Herridge/status/2065193717099892855

COVID Vaccine Mandate Betrayal: Unofficial Transcript

Straight to the Point with Catherine Herridge. LA Times Studios / LA Times Media Group. YouTube upload June 11, 2026.

Herridge: This week on Straight to the Point, new reporting on COVID vaccine injury in the U.S. military. My first investigation as an independent journalist revealed a soldier’s debilitating heart condition was linked by this Army memo to the COVID vaccine. Getting this acknowledgement — what’s called a service connection — is extremely rare.

Karoline Stancik (tape): I’m 24 years old. I have had three heart attacks, a mini stroke, and I’m now getting a pacemaker.

Herridge: What’s to blame?

Stancik: The COVID vaccine. And that’s when everything flipped upside down for me.

Herridge: So is this Army memo an acknowledgement that your heart condition is the result of the COVID vaccine?

Stancik: It 100% is.

Herridge: Were you left behind by the Army and the National Guard?

Stancik: I was left behind and trampled.

Herridge: Even with the new administration, some service members and advocates say there is still a reluctance to link these life-altering conditions to the military’s COVID vaccine mandate. And that impacts access to health care and benefits. So let’s get straight to the point.

1:04  ·  Dressen — advocacy is personal

Herridge: Is your advocacy personal?

Dressen: It is. I’m a previously healthy mother of two young kids and a preschool teacher. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was all in with the measures. So when the call came to vaccinate ourselves to help get us all out of the pandemic, it wasn’t a matter of if I was going to get it. It was when. I decided to enroll in the clinical trial here in the United States. Yeah, I got my one and only shot November 4th, 2020. And within an hour I started having tingling and burning down the same arm as my injection. And then it moved to my other arm, and then to my legs, and to my head. And to this day, five and a half years later, I still have that painful, prickling, tingling, burning sensation surging through my body every minute of every day.

1:57  ·  Young service members

Dressen: What makes COVID vaccine injured service members stand out? In our membership, we have an inordinate number of military service members because the younger population were somehow impacted at a higher rate than older people. And so the people that we deal with the most are people that were hit and struck down at the prime of their life. You know, just barely starting families, just barely getting out of college. These are not people that are going into retirement.

2:30  ·  Redfield — mandate and young immune systems

Herridge: Based on your experience, is there still a reluctance to acknowledge COVID vaccine injury?

Redfield: Yes. Yes, I think at all levels. And there’s a reluctance in the biomedical community. There’s a reluctance in institutions that, in my view, inappropriately mandated these vaccines. The group that probably has more adverse reaction from these vaccines in my clinical experience are younger people. And those are the people that clearly didn’t need to be vaccinated.

Herridge identifies Redfield as former CDC director under President Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Herridge: Based on the science, was the COVID vaccine mandate for the U.S. military under the Biden administration the right call?

Redfield: No. There was no scientific justification for it whatsoever. I argue it was an emotional decision made by some of our leaders at the time — that they said that if you vaccinated everybody, it would stop the pandemic.

Herridge: Why is it that in your experience you see young people with some of the most severe reactions to the vaccine?

Redfield: Because they have a more intact, rigorous immune system. And it’s the immune system that’s driving this. It’s a pro-inflammatory response that’s driving all the complications.

4:02  ·  Karoline Stancik and “in line of duty”

Herridge: We profiled soldier Karoline Stancik. She has a debilitating heart condition. She told us about three heart attacks, a mini stroke, and a pacemaker at 24. Is her case typical of young women who have a COVID vaccine injury?

Dressen: Yes. Unfortunately this cardiac issue is pretty broad. And we only hear about myocarditis, but we still have yet to identify these types of strokes. These are presenting very different than previous issues.

Herridge: In 2023, soldier Karoline Stancik got this memo, and it connects her debilitating heart condition to her service — what they call in the line of duty. Is this memo an acknowledgment that Karoline Stancik’s heart condition is linked to the COVID vaccine?

Dressen: It’s as good an acknowledgment as anyone is going to be able to get.

Herridge: Is it hard to get your COVID vaccine injuries linked to your service?

Dressen: It is near impossible. You’ve got to have the right timing on your diagnosis. You’ve got to have the right condition. You have to have the right level of severity. And then you’ve got to have this land into the right hands.

Herridge: So you’ve only seen a memo like this for a service member who thinks they’re COVID vaccine injured twice.

Dressen: Twice. That’s it.

Herridge: That’s it. And you’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of cases.

Dressen: Yes.

Herridge: Does this memo — is it more than just a military document? Is it acknowledgment and recognition?

Dressen: Yes. Documents like this are incredibly important. They help with disability. They also help the veteran themselves — instead of having to constantly fight for recognition and validation, they’ve got a document. So when they go to a doctor, whether it’s inside the VA or outside, they bring this and they can be taken seriously instead of questions, gaslighting, dismissal.

Herridge: Why do you think Karoline Stancik got this Army memo?

Dressen: Her case is catastrophic and her reaction was very easy to document from the start. You can find strokes on scans, right? And that makes all the difference. There’s a lot of conditions that are far more elusive to identify — autoimmune conditions, inflammatory conditions. It’s unfortunate that these conditions are so dramatic and scary and life-threatening right out of the gate. Those are the ones that get diagnosed and those are the ones that get acknowledged.

6:52  ·  Drew

Herridge: Tell us about Drew. What makes his case stand out?

Dressen: Drew is an incredible, incredible veteran and he’s a young father. He suffered a severe adverse event that’s called Guillain-Barré syndrome, and basically what that means is your immune system attacks your nerves bodywide. If it’s left untreated, it is fatal. So he ended up in the hospital, his legs weren’t working, and the numbness and paralysis just kept moving up and up his body until the hospital put him into a medically induced coma. When he woke up, he could not move an inch anywhere in his body. So his son — his baby son, 9 months old at the time — his wife came and laid his son on his chest. And that’s what gave him the will to live, and he fought for every single inch of movement that he’s regained.

Herridge: Did he have the VA with him at that point?

Dressen: Kind of. But it was because it was such a catastrophic, very visual, insanely expensive vaccine adverse event. So it was impossible to deny what happened to Drew.

Herridge: Even just talking about Drew’s story, I can see that it brings you to tears.

Dressen: It’s heartbreaking to know these families. Every single one of them has stories like this, and every single one of them deserve to have their stories told for the American public to appreciate the sacrifice that these individuals made for us all to be able to be standing here together after the peak of the pandemic.

8:30  ·  Out-of-pocket cost

Herridge: If a service member can’t get that acknowledgement from the VA, how much money are they spending out of pocket to get treatment?

Dressen: Oh, easily six figures.

Herridge: Six figures?

Dressen: Easily. I mean, these are people that are mortgaging their health back, right? These are people that are taking all of their retirement, including any disability benefits that they’re getting. It’s all gone. It’s all going to these treatments that they need.

Herridge: That’s just wrong. I mean, they signed up to protect this country. But they’re using their retirement, they’re using college savings, they’re taking loans against their homes to find specialized care.

Dressen: Yep. They’re losing their homes, they’re moving back in with their parents, they’re taking their parents’ retirement. It’s rough.

9:30  ·  CICP

Herridge: So, for a layperson, what is the CICP?

Dressen: The CICP is a compensation program that’s designed to provide compensation or financial restitution for people that have been harmed by COVID vaccines or other emergency countermeasures.

Herridge: I looked at the data on their website and it says there are about 14,000 claims, 7,000 are pending, approximately 7,000 have been denied, and just over 100 are eligible for compensation. And of that, about 50 have been paid out.

Dressen: Yeah. In the CICP, you have a right to file, and you have a right to lose. Because it has a 98.5% rejection rate, and this is the only avenue for any kind of financial restitution available for COVID vaccine injuries.

Herridge: What is the average payout?

Dressen: There’s a couple of outliers for death benefits, and those are about $377,000. There’s one more for a serious case of TTS, which is severe clotting. When you remove those outliers, the average payout is $4,000.

Herridge: $4,000?

Dressen: Yes. And the only things that are being covered are myocarditis and anaphylaxis.

Herridge: So heart inflammation and sort of an all-of-body allergic reaction.

Dressen: Correct. That is reversible. Anaphylaxis is an acute response that then they can treat right then, and then you can resume normal life.

Herridge: So in your experience, how long does the claims process take?

Dressen: Well, there’s 7,000 that are still waiting to be adjudicated. And those people, by our math, they had to have applied in 2021 and 2022. So there’s people that have been trapped in this system for more than four years at this point. For my case, for example, I was given a diagnosis from the NIH — so National Institutes of Health headquarters evaluated me in person. They diagnosed me with post-vaccine neuropathy. I filed a claim with the CICP program, and they rejected it and said, even with my NIH extensive documentation, they could not prove a causal link to the vaccine.

Herridge: When you were rejected for compensation, you thought what?

Dressen: That I was just one of the 98.5%? That my case was not worthy to be taken seriously.

Herridge: When your case was denied, did you feel that it minimized your suffering?

Dressen: 100%. I don’t think people realize that having a severe complex chronic illness is one thing, but being constantly dismissed by the government, by drug companies, by even your medical teams — that’s something else entirely for people to deal with. So the only reason I’m public is not because of my injury. It’s because of what’s happened after my injury. It’s because these programs have been set up from the beginning to fail good Americans who stepped up, did as we were told. And then when the floor falls out from under us, there’s no safety net there to catch us.

12:50  ·  VA experience

Herridge: When service members who believe that they are COVID vaccine injured go to the VA, what’s their experience?

Dressen: It’s a universal feedback we get from our members — that it’s an abysmal failure. They said that they’ve been failing service members from previous vaccine campaigns and other — you know, like the burn pits, for example. This is no different, but it’s worse, because you can’t talk about it. It’s politically not favorable.

Herridge: So what you’re hearing from service members is that at some VAs, COVID vaccine injury is still highly politicized.

Dressen: Yes.

Herridge: Is it acknowledged?

Dressen: No. No. And acknowledgement is step one. Without acknowledgement, you can’t diagnose it. You can’t treat it. You can’t even make a phone call to somebody at a research facility that may be looking into this. Because you can’t find what you’re not looking for.

Herridge: Let’s take that a step further. So when service members who went to the VA and said, I believe that I’m COVID vaccine injured, and they said, you need mental health counselling—

Dressen: Yes.

Herridge: That’s tough.

Dressen: It is. And these — I mean, these are all men and women that a lot of them have PTSD from combat already. This is a different kind of PTSD that they’re dealing with now from this gaslighting.

Disability ratings

Herridge: Service members who believe they’re COVID vaccine injured — what are they telling you about their experience with the disability ratings process?

Dressen: That’s also a failure. I know two people that were able to get through to anything that would help them. Everybody else has been gaslit, dismissed. The stories have been so heartbreaking. If you can imagine people at the prime of their life, their whole life ahead of them, usually one or two kids at home, babies at home. And they’re all depending on mom or dad, right? And then they get hit with something that they can’t explain what it is. They know that it happened within 24 hours to five days after their COVID vaccine, when they were totally healthy before. But then yet, with this trigger — COVID vaccine — and then catastrophic health failures. Still, somehow, the VA cannot go back and go, okay, there’s something going on here.

15:22  ·  Trump administration approach

Herridge: Is the Trump administration taking a different approach to COVID vaccine injury in the military than the Biden administration?

Dressen: Unfortunately, from everything we’ve seen, the Trump administration — they don’t want to deal with COVID vaccine adverse events. It’s, you know, that was in the past. Let’s forget — you know, we’ll deal with issues moving forward, but let’s move on from that. That’s what we’ve been told. There’s a little bit more dialogue here and there on the Republican side about COVID vaccine injuries and possible adverse events, and so on and so forth. We clearly can talk about mandates and push against mandates, but the real hit against mandates is actually what happens when people have an adverse event to the COVID vaccine, and then they’re mandated to go get another one. Over 86% of the people that go and get a second dose end up way worse after their second dose.

What the VA could do

Herridge: What is the single thing the VA could do to improve the lives of service members who believe that they are COVID vaccine injured?

Dressen: Oh, step one is acknowledgement. You know, we have to identify that there could be an issue. And step two is to diagnose it. It’s very easy to do, but for some reason there’s a hesitancy. And so we hear all the time, we can’t cause vaccine hesitancy. But on this, we’re causing health care hesitancy. Because we’re not allowing for proper health care to happen.

16:55  ·  “True blue Democrat” / anti-vax charge

Herridge: Critics who listen to this interview may say you are an anti-vaxxer — that’s what it’s all about — and that the conversation creates vaccine hesitancy, and that the vaccine protected a lot of people. It didn’t hurt the majority of people who took it. How would you respond?

Dressen: I was a true-blue Democrat, right? I voted for Biden the day before I went in and got my shot, and my life changed forever. Like, I did everything they asked me to do. I was their loyal soldier in the fight against the pandemic. My husband — he’s a PhD chemist. We are science-loving, health-loving people that want to take care of our community. There is nothing about our story that is anti-vax, or less worthy, or, you know, crazy. I mean, the NIH diagnosed me with post-vaccine neuropathy. The lead medical research institution in this country, right? I did all the right things, and still, even with doing all of that, even I was abandoned by the people that I trusted my life with when they said, go get your shot.

18:20  ·  Stancik update

Herridge: We have reached out to the Department of War, the VA, and the vaccine injury compensation program. As we get responses, we’ll share them with you. I spoke with Karoline Stancik. She is the soldier whose debilitating heart condition was linked by the military to the COVID vaccine. After our first investigation, Stancik reports that she got two years of back pay, and she says she’s still working to clear $28,000 of medical debt with the VA. She recently got a service dog that is trained to alert for cardiac issues. She says this is making a world of difference to the quality of life. Karoline says she would like to be working full time, but unfortunately her full-time job remains getting to medical appointments and monitoring her medical condition.

19:04  ·  Drew update

Herridge: I also spoke with Drew, who shared these pictures of his life before the COVID vaccine and his life after the COVID vaccine. And I don’t need to tell you the difference is dramatic. The after pictures show the struggle he and his young family face to overcome these vaccine injuries. Drew says he has a full medical retirement from the Army. He says it’s for injuries he sustained while deployed to the Middle East. He says his medical retirement is silent on COVID vaccine injury — even though he spent six months in the hospital, and he says it took him three years to get out of a wheelchair. Drew is very grateful for everyone’s support for himself and his young family. He is getting into business consulting, and he’s also advocating for other veterans. He is a huge supporter of adaptive sports.

Herridge: This is the kind of accountability journalism you have come to expect here on Straight to the Point. We’ll see you next time.