Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers has been in the news a lot recently. Thanks, of course, to having lied in August about being vaccinated against COVID-19, then catching COVID-19 and admitting he wasn’t vaxxed while denying he lied about it.
Since then, he’s remained pretty defiant about his decision not to protect himself and other people from the disease, primarily by acting as though vaccine refusal is some kind of civil rights issue. For example, last week he borrowed a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed to be “in the cross hairs of the woke mob right now,” and complained that “the final nail” will be put into his “cancel culture casket.”
But Rodgers doesn’t work for the “woke mob,” he works for the National Football League, which doesn’t have a vaccine mandate, but does otherwise have strict policies regarding COVID-19 and avoiding transmission. And on Monday, the organization finally lumbered into the situation and imposed a crushing fine on Rodgers as punishment.
Wait no, not “crushing” or “punishment.” What we meant was “laughable” and “afterthought.” Rodgers has been fined a whopping $14,650 for breaking COVID protocols. Which works out to approximately 0.065401785714286% of the $22.4 million Rodgers will earn by the time 2021 ends. Green Bay wide receiver Allen Lazard was fined the same amount for violating protocols. The fines were standard as part of the players’ COVID protocols.
The reason they were docked is because the NFL found they did not consistently wear masks while using team facilities, and also both attended a mask-free Halloween party, both of which are NFL no-nos for unvaccinated players.
The Green Bay Packers organization was fined a considerably larger amount for these breaches, relative to what Rodgers and Lazard were hit with, but still quite amusing: $300,000. The NFL determined that the Packers didn’t enforce league COVID protocols as required.