The Green Bay Packers lost a winnable football game on Sunday night thanks to Aaron Rodgers.
The standout quarterback refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, caught the virus, and wasn’t eligible to play in his team’s Sunday evening matchup against the Kansas City Chiefs. The Packers lost a tight, low-scoring affair, 13-7. It’s a game they should have won — and likely would have if their starting quarterback had done the right thing and gotten the vaccine.
The coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective. It doesn’t stop every instance of people catching the virus, but it increases the odds that someone won’t catch it. The vaccine also makes people less likely to spread the virus. Plus, it makes people more likely to survive the coronavirus — the latter probably isn’t a major issue for Rodgers because he’s a professional athlete and under 40 years old. Fortunately, he’s not in the demographic that typically dies from the virus. However, being a public health risk and not being able to play are both bad. As an elite professional athlete, he should want to stay healthy and do whatever he can to help his team win football games. That includes getting the vaccine.
Rodgers didn’t. Instead, his team had to start its backup quarterback, and the Packers only scored one touchdown in the loss. The Packers went into the game at 7-1, one of the best teams in the NFL this season. Meanwhile, the Kansas City Chiefs were having a down year, going into the game with a 4-4 record.
The only thing Rodgers has gotten right in this whole thing is that the Right shouldn’t champion him because a vaccine is neither left-wing nor right-wing — it’s a vaccine. He mocked both sides of the political aisle in an interview last week.
“The Right is gonna champion me, and the Left is gonna cancel me. I don’t give a s*** about either of them,” he said. “Politics is a total sham. I’m not going on Fox News, just like I’m not going to go on CNN.”
He also invoked the pro-abortion rights “my body, my choice” slogan when talking about his decision not to get vaccinated. He’s not your hero, conservatives.
Rodgers makes $22.4 million per year to play football in a league subsidized by taxpayers, and he can’t bother to get a shot in a pandemic that has killed more than three-quarters of a million Americans. He’s right that he’s not an admirable figure. He wasn’t being a team player when he refused to get the vaccine. He took a risk, and it hurt his team.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
