Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers told reporters this summer that he had been “immunized” against COVID-19. At the time, many assumed that this meant he’d been vaccinated, because that’s a great way—in fact, the best way—to become immune from COVID-19.
Earlier this week, though, news broke that not only did Rodgers just test positive for COVID, but he wasn’t ever vaccinated in the first place. According to NFL.com reporter Ian Rapoport, instead of getting the shot, Rodgers “received homeopathic treatment from his personal doctor to raise his antibody levels and asked the NFL to review his status.” How did that go? According to Rapoport, “the NFL, NFLPA and joint docs ruled him as unvaccinated.”
On Friday, Rodgers appeared on punter-turned-broadcaster Pat McAfee’s talk show to defend himself, and it went very interestingly. At one point, he quoted Martin Luther King Jr. about the “moral obligation to object to unjust rules.” He said he’s “consulted” podcaster Joe Rogan (an MMA commentator and the former host of Fear Factor) about his medical regimen, and that he’s taking ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug (with no proven efficacy in treating COVID), which has been promoted as a kind of miracle cure by various dubiously credentialed hustlers. And he was hilariously if inadvertently honest about why he hasn’t been wearing a mask during press conferences, explaining that he thinks it’s OK not to if everyone else in the room with him has been vaccinated. (For the record, he also said he’s allergic to one of the ingredients in the Pfizer/Moderna mRNA vaccines but didn’t say which one. Thank you to Ben Baldwin for flagging all these quotes in real time.)
He’s also aware that people on the internet are mad at him:
It’s like Martin Luther King Jr. said in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” though: “Hey, does anyone have some worm pills? Howard Cosell told me they cure cancer.”
