Aaron Rodgers faced a great deal of criticism a few years ago for the way he responded to a question about his vaccination status, and the star quarterback now admits he has one regret over how he handled the situation.
Rodgers was asked prior to the 2021 season if he had gotten the COVID-19 vaccine. At the time, NFL protocols required unvaccinated players to automatically sit out for 10 days if they had not been vaccinated and tested positive for COVID. Rodgers said that he had been “immunized,” which was deliberately misleading. It was later revealed that he was referring to a homeopathic treatment. Rodgers admitted in an interview that he just wanted to get people off of his back. He also said he was allergic to one of the ingredients in the vaccines.
In his soon-to-be-released book “Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers,” author Ian O’Connor spoke with Rodgers about all the vaccine drama. Rodgers said he claimed to be “immunized” because it was “the crux of my appeal” with the NFL. The four-time NFL MVP was in the process of trying to get the NFL to recognize his alternative treatment as an immunization that would allow him to follow the same protocols as vaccinated players.
“I had an immunization card from my holistic doctor, which looked similar. I wasn’t trying to pawn it off as a vaccine card, but I said, ‘Listen, here’s my protocol. Here’s what you can follow to look this up,'” Rodgers said, according to ESPN. “And it was an ongoing appeal. So, if I had just said [I was unvaccinated] in the moment, there’s no chance that the appeal would have been handled the exact same way.”
In hindsight, Rodgers wishes he had just owned that he did not want to take a COVID vaccine.
“But if I could do it again, I would have said [in August], f– the appeal,” Rodgers said. “I’m just going to tell them I’m allergic to PEG, I’m not getting Johnson & Johnson, I’m not going to be vaxxed.’ … If there’s one thing I wish could have gone different, it’s that, because that’s the only thing [critics] could hit me with.”
Now that the pandemic is in the rearview, Rodgers has felt a lot more comfortable trolling people who got so upset over his refusal to get vaccinated. The information we have learned about COVID-19 and the vaccines since that time has also made some of the criticism of Rodgers look even more ridiculous now than it did then.
