News that Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19, is unvaccinated and will miss this weekend’s game against the Chiefs shocked the NFL world on [November 3] — and not just because he said in August that he had already been “immunized.”
Since training camp opened in late July, Rodgers had not been publicly observed to be following any of the obvious protocols for unvaccinated NFL players, as agreed upon this summer by the NFL and NFL Players Association.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) defines vaccination as “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.” Its definition for immunization is “a process by which a person becomes protected against a disease through vaccination.”
So if you want to parse words in retrospect, you could interpret Rodgers’ response to mean he believed himself to be protected against COVID-19 without overtly saying he received an approved vaccination.
Why did he think he was protected against COVID-19?
According to ESPN’s Rob Demovsky, Rodgers pursued an alternative treatment and then petitioned the NFL to recognize him as vaccinated. The NFL refused, citing the clear language of the NFL-NFLPA agreement reached this summer.
