NFL Open Thread: Fuck Aaron Rodgers edition

The thing about Rodgers’s crank anti-vaxx talking points is that they’re even stupider than can be described in a short summary:

The following is a selection of what Rodgers said on McAfee’s show:

• Rodgers said that he chose a homeopathic treatment he believes boosted his immunity to COVID-19 over the approved vaccines because he is allergic to an ingredient in the two FDA-approved mRNA vaccines, produced by Pfizer and Moderna. He did not take the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, he said, because it “got pulled due to clotting issues” in April and “was not an option at that point.” Use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was temporarily paused in April but resumed later that month after a review of available data by the CDC and FDA. Health experts found that the risk of clotting after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was roughly one in a million cases, mostly in women between the ages of 20 and 50.
• Rodgers declined to share what his homeopathic treatment entailed but described it as “a way to stimulate my immune system to create a defense against COVID,” which happens to be a very good way of describing how vaccines work.
• Rodgers said that the NFL “sent in this stooge early in training camp to shame [Green Bay] for being 19th in the league in vaccination rate.” He said that the NFL “thought I was a quack” and denied his appeal to be exempted from league policies for unvaccinated players.
• Rodgers used the phrase “my body, my choice.”
• He said that “people hate ivermectin” because pharmaceutical companies “can’t make any money off of it.”
• Rodgers said that he was being placed in a “cancel-culture casket.”
• Rodgers said that he is “not some anti-vaxx, flat-earther.” He also asked, “If the vaccine is so great, then how come people are still getting COVID and spreading COVID?” Rodgers said multiple times he believes he got the virus from a vaccinated person but did not offer evidence. “This idea that it’s the pandemic of the unvaccinated, it’s just a total lie,” he said. A CDC study of COVID-19 cases and outcomes across the U.S. from April 4 to July 17, 2021, found that 92 percent of positive cases, 92 percent of hospitalizations, and 91 percent of COVID-19-related deaths were reported among those not fully vaccinated.
• Rodgers said he was comfortable not wearing a mask around groups of vaccinated people because he believes their trust in the vaccine should make it irrelevant to those groups whether he’s masked or not. On clearly having violated the NFL’s COVID-19 protocols by giving press conferences indoors without a mask, Rodgers said he considered it his responsibility to go against a policy he doesn’t believe in.

If Rodgers was trying for Intellectual Horse Paste Web bullshit so rote and uninspired Bari Weiss would be reluctant to host it at her ShakeShack, mission accomplished!

Also, as Princiotti notes, the lesson of “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” is not “a wealthy person can ignore any rule they don’t like for any arbitrary and self-serving reason”:

“The great MLK said you have a moral obligation to object to unjust rules and rules that make no sense,” Rodgers said. “In my opinion, it makes no sense for me.”

In “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (a clause I was not expecting to write today), King defines an unjust law this way: “An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself.” A just law, King wrote, “is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself.”

Those compelling Rodgers to follow the NFL’s protocols are also following the protocols themselves. Jordan Love, the Packers’ backup quarterback who will start Sunday in Rodgers’s stead, showed up to his Friday afternoon press conference wearing a mask. Love is vaccinated and not required by NFL policy to mask indoors, but wore the mask because he had been designated a close contact of a player who had tested positive—Rodgers. The use of King’s argument for nonviolent protest against segregation to promote Rodgers’s belief that he shouldn’t have to wear a mask inside is also wildly disproportionate.

What a maroon. Hopefully Brady can take care of business again, or Stafford can hold up in the playoffs.