Dhe pandemic code of conduct agreement between the league and the NFL players’ union is a gem of American law: 93 pages long, jam-packed with ifs and buts, and so elaborate, and designed to avoid any controversy about its interpretation in the first place.
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Quite likely, Aaron Rodgers, quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, at least skimmed the paper before deciding at the start of the season not to fight the Covid-19 virus, unlike the 93 percent of his colleagues in the National Football League to get vaccinated. Because the agreement expressly allows this. But it also contains a catalog of fines that should not have impressed a man like Rodgers, who made $ 22 million this year: the penalty for a first violation is $ 14,650.
Which is why the 37-year-old sounded quite rested when he reported on Friday from the sofa of his house in the suburbs of Green Bay by video on the daily talk show of former NFL punter Pat McAfee. Just a day before it became known that he had tested positive for Corona and had been quarantined for at least ten days. The performance revealed that Rodgers not only has something against NFL regulations (“Some of the rules are not based on science”), but a completely different worldview of the fight against the pandemic that so far has killed 754,000 people in the United States alone has cost.
Rodgers: “I’m Immunized”
For example, weeks earlier he had given the league “more than 500 pages of research” about wearing masks and the effectiveness of the vaccines to which he was allegedly allergic. He has strengthened his immune system with homeopathic remedies. And he had sought alternatives from alleged experts, such as treatment with the drug ivermectin, which is used in veterinary medicine to de-worm horses.
At least it became clear why the 2011 Super Bowl winner and his comrades in the spirit are doggedly against requirements for the protection of the general public and accept the risk of infecting themselves and others: They select their own truths together. Everything so that their anti-attitude can somehow be substantiated with arguments.
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Just one day later, a first advertising partner found himself under pressure to act in the face of such persistence. On Saturday, Prevea Health, a network of more than 400 medical practices and clinics in the state of Wisconsin, announced the contract with Rodgers. The advertising expert Michael Mirer, professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, suspects that this reaction was not all: “Rodgers’ problem is that he is perceived as dishonest.” A few weeks ago he asked journalists whether he was vaccinated, answered in a misleading way: “I am immunized.”
The team management, although in the picture about his actual vaccination status, had never corrected this statement and is now also in a bad light. The matter also had immediate consequences on the field: Without playmaker Rodgers, who was represented by substitute Jordan Love, they lost originally favored Packers on Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs 7:13.
So far it is unclear how the quarterback got infected. His partner, actress Shailene Woodley, came out a while ago as a supporter of alternative medicine. It is part of their ambitions to drink mountain spring water they have drawn themselves, to personally produce toothpaste and natural remedies and to avoid products from the pharmaceutical industry. Part of the league’s research was a Halloween party attended by both Rodgers and Packers players Marcedes Lewis and Randall Cobb – a possible violation of the NFL’s pandemic rules for unvaccinated players.
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One of the curiosities of Rodgers’s talk show appearance was his t-shirt. It shows the stylized face of the actor Val Kilmer and a quote from the Hollywood film “Tombstone”: the macho saying that the Wild West legend Doc Holliday calls out to a rival before a revolver duel: “Say when …”. Doc Holliday died at the age of just 36, not from a bullet, but from a contagious disease that is just as transmitted as Covid-19 – tuberculosis.
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