Firstly, he said his team the Green Bay Packers flagrantly divided the players along medical lines by making the majority vaccinated players wear green wrist bands and the handful of unvaccinated players wear yellow bands. Visual segregation.
Moreover, unvaccinated players were exclusively forced to wear masks and cannot freely travel during road games. The marginalized second-class players also have to exercise separately during team workouts.
What science justifies this level of discrimination? If the players are (thankfully) allowed to practice and play on the field together, what good does separating them during team workouts do? Or allowing some players on the road to attend concerts, comedy shows, and restaurants of their choosing but banning others from doing so?
Many of these nonsensical policies were founded on fundamental untruths about COVID-19, such as the vaccine effectively curbing transmission.
Last August, as Rodgers explained, when he told the league he wasn’t vaccinated, he was informed he was endangering other people and posed a serious threat.
“There was a reporter out of Chicago who said I’m the biggest jerk in the league and he wouldn’t vote for me for MVP because of my vax status,” Rodgers recounted on The Joe Rogan Experience.
“Calm down! He’s a football player. He read some articles. He got skeptical. He did some research. Are you stunned he came to the wrong conclusion?” Ansari joked. He went on: “It’s like we’re all in high school and we’re making fun of the quarterback for doing bad on the science test. ... This guy makes a living getting hit in the head. Can we cut him a break?”
The Aaron Rodgers saga publicly exemplifies the dehumanizing treatment that the unvaccinated have suffered over the past two years. For every nasty article written on Rodgers, there were thousands of unvaccinated people who were mocked, derided, and defriended by life-long friends, family members, and neighbors.
In a moment of remarkable vulnerability, Alex Berenson told Rogan in their recent conversation that the worst part of the pandemic for him was losing some of his closest friends (which he said he only had a few of) because of his contrarian COVID-19 reporting.
In the end, celebrity athletes like Rodgers and contrarian media voices like Berenson making millions every year on Substack are not the most disaffected victims. Those who lost their jobs, went broke, plunged into depression and isolation, and faced social ostracism at every corner in a suddenly abusive campaign to end the supposed “pandemic of the unvaccinated” are owed an apology for being wrongly maligned and systemically discriminated against. A failure to do so would be inhumane.
