Sports media figures predictably ramped up their attacks on the unvaccinated Aaron Rodgers over the weekend after the Green Bay Packers’ quarterback tested positive for coronavirus.
It’s impossible to take any of their screeds seriously, however, because while they lambaste Rodgers for “lying” about his vaccination status or spreading “misinformation” about COVID treatment, they make their livings by lying and spreading misinformation.
Take ESPN’s NFL analyst Mina Kimes, who attacked Rodgers, saying he “actively misled people” and “went on to spout a bunch of misinformation to a big audience.”
First of all, Kimes and the rest of the journalist class should view Rodgers’ infamous “I’ve been immunized” comment as a learning opportunity and an indictment of their poor reporting skills. After all, it’s not his fault nobody bothered to ask a follow-up question about what he meant by “immunized.”
[RELATED: 9 Truths From Aaron Rodgers’ Explosive Vaxx Interview You Aren’t Allowed To Say]
But more importantly, Kimes should be more careful about the kind of misinformation she’s spouting.
Rodgers’ decision not to get vaccinated is a “choice that affects other people,” Kimes said in a TV interview. “Not just his football team but other humans because this is a contagious illness. Far too few people seem to understand that still, and for him to perpetuate that I guess just shows us that he doesn’t care.”
Notwithstanding Kimes’ baseless claim that “far too few people” understand that coronavirus is contagious, her condemnation of Rodgers for not considering others in his choice not to get the jab completely ignores two important facts. First, vaccinated players can still contract and spread COVID-19. Second, Rodgers is tested daily, unlike his vaccinated teammates, meaning he’s less likely to unknowingly infect anyone else.
As Rodgers himself rightly told Pat McAfee last week, he probably got the virus from one of his vaccinated colleagues. Does Kimes have anything to say about that?
The difference between Lamar, Cousins, Wentz, and Rodgers is only one of those QBs a. actively misled people and b. went on to spout a bunch of misinformation to a big audience. Hope that clears things up! https://t.co/dsQ3sUYxrF
— Mina Kimes (@minakimes) November 7, 2021
Or take the lies we heard from former player and now-analyst Terry Bradshaw, who in one breath rebuked Rodgers for lying and in the next breath perpetuated the same defamatory “horse-dewormer” lie the media previously hurled at Joe Rogan.
“It would’ve been nice if he’d have just come to the Naval Academy and learned how to be honest, learned not to lie. Because that’s what you did, Aaron. You lied to everyone,” Bradshaw snapped, before lying: “What you were doing was taking stuff that would keep you getting COVID-19. You got COVID-19. Ivermectin is a cattle dewormer. Sorry, folks, that’s what it is.”
Certifiable moron Terry Bradshaw just repeated the lie on @NFLonFOX that Ivermectin is a cattle dewormer.
That is not true. The guy who invented it won a Nobel Prize in 2015.
It was a claim that was invented by idiots pic.twitter.com/pIWIDpD2Hx
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 7, 2021
Other media personalities employed similar tactics, throwing Rodgers under the bus for using monoclonal antibodies because that treatment “does not prevent the infection” while willfully ignoring the fact that the vaccines do not prevent the infection either. Others piled onto the Kimes deception that Rodgers “[put] himself and anyone he might have come into contact with at risk of exposure” while again neglecting to mention that his unvaxxed counterparts would be more likely to have the virus without knowing it.
In a Substack rant about how Rodgers “damaged professional sports,” NBA icon and frequent sports commentator Kareem Abdul-Jabbar threw around CDC statistics about COVID-19 deaths of the vaxxed and unvaxxed. But he conveniently made no mention of the quarterback’s age and physical fitness which leave Rodgers at extremely low risk of deadly illness.
There are plenty of non-pandemic criticisms that reporters and the commentary class could hurl at Rodgers. But until they stop lying about the ability of the vaxxed to spread COVID, their role as journalists to probe into words like “immunized,” Ivermectin being a horse dewormer, and the general public’s understanding of viruses, to name of few of many, they have no grounds to attack anyone else for “misinformation.”
