With literally no surprise at all, it is becoming pretty clear that a lot of NFL players aren’t vaxxed and aren’t going to be. Just another glorious consequence of making a global health crisis a political dividing line. Cole Beasely went on a Twitter tirade, Josh Allen isn’t vaxxed, Montez Sweat said he needed to get more information before he makes a decision…after Ron Rivera brought in literal experts to give the team all the necessary information, showing that he’s not looking for facts but someone to confirm what he already believes. Sam Darnold also apparently hasn’t gotten the shot, which at this point means he likely won’t. It seems the league is around 50% vaxxed from what I’ve seen reports about.

I’m astounded all these guys are willing to risk the paychecks more than anything. You catch covid and you’re sidelined for a while and you don’t play thanks to illness or just quarantine. If it could flatten Miles Garrett, nobody is safe, NFL body or not. You’d think of all people Sam Darnold would understand the benefits of not being sidelined for weeks due to a preventable illness. This dude caught Mono and was done for half a season. Mono sucks and from the sound of it seems close in symptoms to what Covid can do. If you can get a pop in the arm and basically prevent that from happening, why wouldn’t you? You’d hope that all the people who have been vaxxed for months now being absolutely fine would help assuage vaccine hesitancy in those not too far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy. Guess not. I’m fully vaxxed, the second shot knocked me out for a day, and that was it. The peace of mind since has been a godsend.

The worst part is how the vaccine keeps being framed as a personal choice, an individual decision. It’s not. It affects literally everyone around you. Montez Sweat not getting protected literally puts his cancer survivor coach in more harm’s way. This isn’t like a cancer drug or most drugs. You can’t catch cancer from another person. You can’t catch drunk, or high, or diabetes from another person. You can catch covid. By not getting yourself protected, you put everyone around you at further risk, you reduce herd immunity, which just means this stupid fucking disease that has killed almost 600k people in the US alone (as of writing) is just going to keep on sticking around being a pest when we could realistically move beyond it if just a little bit more of the population got the jab. To everyone who has gotten the jab, thank you. Even a shut-in like me wants some things to return to normal without feeling like I risk my life every time I go to the grocery store because some Karen read a Facebook post that Bill Gates is tracking her movements.  Why would they need to put microchips in a shot, they just track us through our smartphones already.

Curious to see what happens when an NFL player does catch it and misses the game checks. Hopefully that changes some minds.