The Patriot Post® · COVID and Its Reputational Repercussions
Quick: Who was State Farm’s NFL pitchman before Patrick Mahomes? If you answered “Aaron Rodgers,” you win a set of steak knives.
I ask this question because lucrative endorsement gigs were just one of the things Rodgers lost when it became public that he hadn’t been truthful about his COVID-19 vaccination status. “Yeah, I’ve been immunized,” was Rodgers’s response to the question from Ryan Wood of the Green Bay Press-Gazette. On Thursday, August 21, 2021, when the country was up to its eyeballs in the COVID fever swamp, Wood asked, “Are you vaccinated, and what’s your stance on vaccinations?”
As it turned out, Rodgers hadn’t gotten the stick, but he did have an “immunization card” from his holistic doctor, and he said he was allergic to one of the components of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines. Furthermore, Rodgers, who’d long had a reputation as the NFL’s best long-form interviewee, had done a lot of homework on the vaccines being pushed by Anthony Fauci and his minions — questions about their safety and their effectiveness, as well as questions about why Fauci and company kept trashing treatments other than the jab.
More than anything else, though, Rodgers was a proponent of bodily autonomy — as all free people should be — and he didn’t think anyone should be forced to have an experimental vaccine injected into his body. Not by the NFL, and not, for example, by the Department of Defense, as was the case when Joe Biden was commander-in-chief.
And so, Rodgers took the slings and arrows for not having bowed to Fauci and the COVID tyrants. He lost endorsements. He lost standing among many fans and some of his teammates. He was ripped to shreds by the likes of former late-night unfunnyman Jimmy Kimmel. And he was called a “murderer” by a lot of people who didn’t know the first thing about how COVID worked and whom it targeted.
It was perhaps with a sense of both vindication and schadenfreude that Rodgers took to the familiar set of The Pat McAfee Show yesterday and let Anthony Fauci have it.
“I feel great about it..
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) August 3, 2026
I told you I would be on the right side of history”@AaronRodgers12 #PMSLive https://t.co/dEWpmSNxSP pic.twitter.com/ldRjSrWNAB
“I’m going to plead the Fifth … like that absolute coward, Tony Fauci,” Rodgers said. “Are you kidding me? You got a pardon, and you pleaded [the Fifth] over 100 times. What are you scared of, Tony? … I thought you were the science, and he gets up there and can’t answer a question.”
The McAfee show is on liberal ESPN of all places, so its woke East Coast talkingheads couldn’t have been too pleased that Rodgers didn’t spare their network, either. “How much,” he asked, rhetorically, “did the network spend on … on my responses every week, on my vaccination status, on Taylor and Travis’s wedding? Did they do even a minute on Tony Fauci?”
As the New York Post reports, “Rodgers went on to call out ESPN for its coverage on the former four-time MVP and his stance on the vaccine at the time — and mentioned that ‘there’s been a lot of silence’ by the Worldwide Leader after Fauci’s hearing.”
That’s not all. “Expect to see a lot more of this,” writes columnist David Strom, “prominent people who were absolutely savaged for refusing to take the COVID vaccine and being open about it.” Strom continued:
We may never get justice for all the horrific things that Anthony Fauci did to us and all the abuse heaped on ordinary people who decided to swim upstream, but it’s good to see that at least some of the Fauci worshippers are having their noses rubbed into the pile of crap they tried to dump on everybody else.
He’s right. Those who stood strong for their principles were indeed savaged by the Fauci cultists. And they were cultists. You know the kind: Your Facebook “friends” who parroted his every utterance and worshiped at his church of disinformation. Next up? Maybe tennis great Novak Djokovic, or NBAer Kyrie Irving, or golfer Bryson DeChambeau, or mixed martial artist Conor McGregor.
Or maybe the three brave and wise doctors who authored the Great Barrington Declaration — a straightforward document that, even back in October 2020, charted a COVID course free of the madness, the masking, the social distancing, the lockdowns. “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the document presciently noted. “The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health — leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.”
Talk about shelf life.
Then there was Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC director who was “sidelined” by Fauci for daring to hold a different viewpoint about the coronavirus’s Wuhan lab origins, bravely unloaded on Fauci back in 2023, long before it was politically safe to do so. “I think the most upsetting thing to me,” Redfield said about his vilification, “was the Baltimore Sun calling me a racist because I said this came from a Wuhan lab.”
Or Sage Steele, the former ESPN personality who spoke out against the vaccine mandate of ESPN’s parent company, Disney — a decision for which she ultimately lost her job.
All these people are, in a way, like Ronald Reagan’s former labor secretary, Ray Donovan. In 1987, as he left a Bronx courthouse a free man, having just been found not guilty by a jury that deliberated just 10 hours over two days after a life-wrecking eight-month-long corruption trial, Donovan wondered, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”