Aaron Rodgers has turned himself into the latest iteration of Rudy Gobert, the guy who fucked around and found out when it came to COVID-19 protocols. Rodgers’ lies throughout his coronavirus saga have made him a rightful target of scorn from everyone who has actually taken this pandemic seriously — including a couple of kids, my own kids, who were home on Tuesday because of 20-some cases at their New York City school.
Rodgers is reportedly unhappy about the angry reaction to his interview with Pat McAfee last week, but kids can also see through his bullshit.
“He’s wrong,” said 6-year-old Sean Spector, a first-grader. “I do think he still should’ve gotten the vaccine, like the ads say.”
The commercials to get vaccinated are nearly as ubiquitous these days as Rodgers’ ads for State Farm used to be, until the quarterback’s anti-vaccine idiocy led the insurance company to mostly yank them from the air, even while putting out a wishy-washy statement supporting individuals’ rights to make their own vaccine choices.
The kids are at least a little sympathetic to Rodgers’ argument about not being vaccinated because they accept his dubious claim about being allergic to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. But these elementary schoolers can also see where his logic falls apart.
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“It’s fair for people to be mad at him,” says 8-year-old Alice Spector, who has gotten to go to school three days so far this month because of outbreaks of a virus that initially wasn’t much of a danger to kids, but has evolved into child-threatening variants due to lax protocol adherence over the last year. “It’s half fair and half not fair because he’s allergic to two of the vaccines, and he’s heard bad things about the Johnson & Johnson — my dad got Johnson & Johnson. But it is fair because he lied about it and that’s a really big thing to lie about.
“My point of view, that’s being like, you know what, let’s let the supervillains take over, let’s not call the superheroes. He probably didn’t know where it came from because he believed it. If he knew what source it came from, he probably wouldn’t have believed them because maybe he’d heard from a few friends that had heard from a resource that was not very good.”
Indeed, the resource that Rodgers heard from is Joe Rogan, the former supporting actor on NewsRadio and host of Fear Factor who is neither a doctor nor a research scientist.
“Yeah, that’s not research,” Alice said. “Can I say something about Joe Rogan? Please don’t trust Joe Rogan with this. Trust experts with the vaccine and sources that you know are true. And if you’re not sure they’re true, do research about that resource.”
Sean needed to know what Rodgers meant when he said he had been “immunized.” So, I explained that Rodgers meant he’d gotten protection from COVID-19 somehow other than getting the vaccine.
“What was his special way not to get vaccinated?” Sean asked.
“Can you guess?” I asked him.
“Getting horse medicine!”
Yup.
The ads for the COVID-19 vaccine have been on nonstop, and both Sean and Alice have regularly yelled at the television when they come on, shouting into the void about how much they’d like to get their shots, if only they were eligible. That finally happened last week, and now, they’re back home from school again, while a star quarterback prattles on about nonsense and gets it out into the press that he has the sads about everyone calling him out for that nonsense.
“I would tell him there have been 20 cases in my school, which only has 1,000 kids,” Sean said. “And that’s yesterday, only one frickin’ day!”
There are currently two members of the Packers on the COVID-19 list, Rodgers and cornerback Isaac Yiadom. It’s easier for an NFL team to prevent a double-digit outbreak because most of the players, like most adult Americans, are fully vaccinated.
Because the vaccine works. Even children can see that. It’s too bad that the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers still can’t.
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