https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/opinion/2021/11/05/green-bay-quarterback-aaron-rodgers-is-right-about-being-in-the-covid-crosshairs-forty-five-minutes-of-misinformation-will-put-you-there.html?rf
Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers is right about being in the COVID crosshairs. Forty-five minutes of misinformation will put you there
By Bruce ArthurColumnist
Fri., Nov. 5, 2021timer5 min. read
I live in a world where Mike McCarthy kept his job as my boss for 13 years. I don’t trust authority.
If Aaron Rodgers had just said that, maybe the rest would have been an easier ride. But then again, he may be the greatest quarterback in the biggest pro sports league of a country where at least 775,000 people have died during the pandemic, and Friday he spent 45 minutes pumping out the kind of misinformation that can get people killed. You know what that means? Rodgers could be president, one day.
All grim, tight-faced jokes aside, the Green Bay Packers great has had himself a week. Rodgers contracted COVID, it turned out he wasn’t vaccinated, and Friday he went on former punter and current shouty bro Pat McAfee’s Sirius XM show and delivered almost every anti-vaccine talking point you can imagine.
“I realize I’m in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now, so before my final nail gets put in my cancel culture casket, I’d like to set the record straight on so many of the blatant lies out there,” Rodgers said.
In poker, they’d call that entire sentence a tell.
Honestly, Rodgers portrayed himself as a probing, rigorous, independent mind and then hit the bingo card of almost every anti-vax forum you can find on Facebook, 8chan or Fox News. Doing his own research? Check. Bodily autonomy? Check. Ivermectin? Check. Hydroxychloroquine? Check. Homeopathy, natural immunity, vaccine-related sterility, why don’t doctors talk about being healthy, and inhaling too much CO2 while wearing a mask? Check.
Coercion, collusion, the woke mob, cancel culture, Joe Rogan, and citing Martin Luther King? That’s a discount double check all the way, brother.
“If the vaccine is so great, then how come people are still getting COVID and spreading?” Rodgers asked, which is one of those questions that are truly impossible to answer unless you have access to Google and a lick of common sense.
The vaccines do not promise 100 per cent efficacy, but offer a high degree of protection against both acquiring the virus and severe medical outcomes; there is evidence of waning immunity versus transmission depending on the interval between two shots, which is where the idea of third-shot boosters come in. While we’re here, natural immunity is not superior to vaccine-based immunity. There is also zero evidence vaccines cause sterility, but the anti-vaccine community had to believe in something else after their predictions of mass vaccine-related death hasn’t manifested in, uh reality. COVID may contribute to infertility, though.)
It was a journey into the fever swamps. Rodgers claimed an NFL doctor told him the vaccinated could neither catch nor spread the virus, which sounds like a lie even if you accept that an NFL-employed doctor is like a mob-employed lawyer; Lindsay Jones of The Athletic reported a league source denied Rodgers had ever spoken to an NFL doctor or an infectious diseases expert employed by both the league and the union. Rodgers said he didn’t lie when he used to the word “immunized” in a question about being vaccinated, because … uh, because it was some sort of witch hunt.
I mean, maybe he is one of the vanishingly few who are allergic to an ingredient in the mRNA vaccines, but when you also throw out anti-vax bingo it seems less likely. Rodgers declined to explain the homeopathic process he used to substitute for vaccination, which is probably for the best because that’s not a thing. When asked what the NFL said when he presented his case for natural immunity over vaccination, Rodgers — who says he took both Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, neither of which is recommended for COVID — said, “I think they thought I was a quack.”
Well, I mean, yes. Rodgers criticized the science behind the NFL’s collectively bargained COVID safety protocols in one breath — the team and league letting him talk to reporters maskless is indeed a choice — and said he called podcast bro Joe Rogan for medical advice in another. Rodgers claimed every single left-leaning person was anti-vaccine while Donald Trump was president, before flipping their opinion when Joe Biden got in. Yeah?
If you live in a reality-based universe, you’d consider this an extraordinary fall from grace. Fellow quarterback great Tom Brady has previously hawked concussion juice and the idea that drinking enough water will prevent sunburns, but he is fully vaccinated, so he is the reasonable one here. It’s an incredible twist.
Mostly, though, this was deeply sad. Rodgers has long been considered a thoughtful, intelligent and simply brilliant athlete. He’s funny, and smart. And while Rodgers’ 22-year-old actress fiancée espouses ingesting clay as part of her health regimen, it was still shocking to hear someone of Rodgers’s pedigree ramble down this path.
But it shouldn’t have been. If Rodgers seems to live in the classic cherry-picked world of YouTube research and half-baked ideas, consider that he is far from alone. Just 58.5 per cent of Wisconsin is fully vaccinated, and the state is closing in on 10,000 deaths; that’s more or less Ontario’s mortality in a jurisdiction with 40 per cent of the population, and Wisconsin is only 40th among U.S. states in death rate. You can chart states that voted for Donald Trump and states that voted for Joe Biden, and the correlation between voting for Trump and higher death rates — and, of course, less vaccination — is an almost perfect connection. And it shouldn’t shock anyone if Trump wins the next election.
And faced with a reality-based risk assessment that shows vaccines are the best and safest way to protect yourselves and others from a virus that has upended the entire planet, Aaron Rodgers, in quarterbacking terms, couldn’t read the defence. He was utterly sure of himself, while babbling that it’s propaganda that it’s primarily a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Which, largely, it is.
The problem with an infodemic is anybody can fall prey to it; anyone, no matter their advantages, can fall down a hole. Aaron Rodgers has everything, more or less. He’s one of the greats. And it’s a shame, but he’s lost. And he will get somebody killed.
