These days, few communal clap backs are as satisfying as when an anti-vaxxer gets their ass publicly handed to them. This week, that jackass is Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

Rodgers, who was fined $15,000 by the NFL last Tuesday for failing to get vaccinated, was taken to task in expert fashion by New Yorker writer Louisa Thomas this week.

Rodgers, who had previously told reporters he was “immunized” against the virus came clean recently as having never received any of the three FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines. 

“Rodgers wasn’t lying, exactly, when he said that he’d been immunized—he was just telling his truth,” Thomas writes.

Instead of letting a healthcare worker prick his massive bicep with a big scary needle, Rodgers and his team went through some kind of alternative treatment to “stimulate” his immune system, Thomas reports. 

The lauded quarterback then defended his decision by clumsily invoking a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. on Pat McAfee’s Sirius XM radio show.

“The great MLK said that you have a moral obligation to object to unjust rules and rules that make no sense,” Rodgers said.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think MLK meant for his words to defend folks willingly endangering the community by exposing themselves and others to a deadly virus. Actually, Thomas points out, what MLK meant when he said “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” wasn’t about “Imma do me.” It was about an obligation to do what is good for society as a whole. Just laws, King said, are “as those that the majority are willing not only to enforce but to follow.”  

Like vaccines, obviously.

Beyond MLK though, the way Thomas unravels the contours of Rodgers’s bogus science is simply brilliant. 

As Thomas writes: At one point, he asked, “What about ‘my body, my choice?’” It has become increasingly popular among anti-vaxxers to invoke this pro-choice slogan and to refer repeatedly to bodily autonomy, without acknowledging that covid is a contagious disease that is spread, through the air, from person to person. (No one ever caught an abortion.) 

“I go back to these two questions for this woke mob,” Rodgers said. “If the vaccine is so great, how come people are still getting covid and spreading covid and unfortunately dying from covid? If the vaccine is so safe, how come the manufacturers of the vaccine have full immunity?” (The C.D.C. reports that unvaccinated individuals are six times more likely to test positive for covid and eleven times more likely to die from it. The emergency authorization of the covid vaccines does shield their manufacturers from some lawsuits, though not all.) 

Rodgers probably needs to stop listening to Joe Rogan and actually consider that real human beings, without an abundance of money and dignity to burn, are dying of COVID-19 every day because of folks who think their so-called freedom is more important than another person’s life.

Wake up, Aaron. 

The woke mob isn’t chasing you. They’re running away. 

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Follow Senior Staff Writer Leigh Tauss on Twitter or send an email to ltauss@indyweek.com.