Southpaw #12: Make Athletes Wait
The COVID vaccine rollout shouldn't prioritize pro athletes, even if leagues can pay to cut the line.
Dear readers,
As we round the bend into the heart of the holiday season (Happy Hanukkah to those celebrating), we’re still asking for your help. We have big plans for the newsletter, and we want to grow a lot in 2021. So if you’ve been enjoying our work and would like to see us make more of it (and pay others to contribute), we’d be honored if you could donate what you can here. Our long game is to follow Colin Kaepernick and launch our own Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor, but we’re still trying to figure out our flavor profile, so we’ll have to stick with donations for the time being. (We agree with Kap’s mission, and the fudge chips, even if we do think ice cream is better with dairy, for those who can stomach it. Maybe we’re ice cream traditionalists!)
Make the Athletes Wait
Since news broke of an effective COVID-19 vaccine, Americans have been engaged in a high-stakes bickering match over who should be vaccinated first. A few demographic groups have emerged as obvious candidates for the top of the list: front-line health-care workers, the elderly, people with serious health conditions. On Friday, the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel gave the Pfizer vaccine the green light and recommended that health-care workers and nursing home residents be the first to roll up their sleeves.
But with a depressing air of inevitability, another class of workers has quickly entered the mix for early vaccination: professional athletes. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that some public health officials support vaccinating professional athletes early as a way to build public trust in the vaccine. Admittedly, the motives of the experts cited in the report were not entirely misguided. Recent polling shows that skepticism of the vaccine is especially widespread in Black communities, who have historically been exploited as vaccine guinea pigs by the medical and public health communities. Already, a number of high-profile public figures like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Anthony Fauci have offered to publicize their vaccinations, and adding a few big-name athletes like LeBron James or Steph Curry, some experts suggest, would help build confidence in the vaccine among some Black Americans.
But not all proponents of early athlete vaccination are acting on such charitable motives. On Friday, news broke that the National Hockey League is planning to purchase enough of the vaccine to vaccinate everyone involved in its upcoming season, which is set to begin in January. The league later clarified that it does not intend to “jump the line” by purchasing the vaccine before it’s widely available for private sale, but public blowback to the league’s suggestion remained swift and harsh. As plenty of people pointed out, the league seemed to be talking directly out of its ass, since shelling out tons of money to buy large quantities of the vaccine, regardless of the date, would appear to be the very definition of “skipping the line.”
None of this, of course, is particularly surprising. Since the very onset of the pandemic, professional sports leagues and the more lucrative NCAA leagues have taken advantage of their significant capital to ensure that both their athletes and, more importantly, their bottom lines remain insulated from the worst effects of the pandemic. As health-care workers and patients around the country wait days for much-needed live-virus tests, professional and collegiate athletes have been sticking Q-Tips up their noses with casual frequency. In the background, league officials and athletic directors quietly insist that sports were not in fact a drag on the national testing capacity, despite droves of evidence to the contrary.
When it comes to vaccinations, though, that’s a much harder argument to make. In fact, it’s practically impossible. Unless leagues can find a way to pay for the development of their own vaccines (extremely unlikely at this stage given medical hurdles, but not impossible, given the depths of their pockets), vaccinating athletes early would necessarily divert doses from the general population. And while it’s true that high-profile athletes like LeBron could play an important role in the effort to build public confidence in the vaccine, that doesn’t justify widespread early vaccination of pro athletes. It's one thing for a handful of high-profile stars to broadcast their vaccination on Instagram; it’s another thing entirely for leagues and public health experts to argue that it’s in the public interest for all professional athletes to get vaccinated before the rest of the general population. It’s also not clear that all players are ready and willing to get the vaccine in the first place, as ESPN reported earlier this week. Some players, like L.A. Lakers center Marc Gasol, have said they wouldn’t support early vaccinations for players as a matter of principle.
This should be our collective default assumption, and we shouldn’t have to praise athletes like Gasol for adopting commonsense attitudes about public health and basic democratic fairness. But here we are. The pandemic response has accentuated all the class inequalities that we’re learned to take for granted, as geriatric government officials get pumped full of experimental drugs that aren’t available to the general public and limousine liberals pay gig workers to hold their places in lines for COVID tests.
The vaccine rollout will sure to be full of similar machinations, and rich sports leagues will find a way to skip the lines one way or another. And they’ll probably get away with it, since they’ve gotten away with it so far, and there’s nothing to suggest that the deaths of 300,000 of their would-be consumers have inspired in them any sort of moral clarity. What do you call the stage of capitalism where everyone has just accepted this basic inequity as “the way things are”?
But it’s important to remember that this isn’t the way things need to be. With just a little bit of ingenuity, it’s not hard to come up with plenty of ways that influential athletes and their billion-dollar organizations could contribute to the vaccination effort that don’t involve self-interested schemes to vaccinate themselves. Teams could use their sizable outreach programs in underserved communities of color to host education programs about the vaccine before it becomes widely available. Organizations could offer up their stadiums for mass-vaccination drives, much like they converted their stadiums into polling places during the elections. Owners could prioritize vaccinating stadium employees and non-team staff to demonstrate their commitment to the parts of their “team communities” that have endured the most economic hardship during the pandemic. On Wednesday, the NBA announced that it had raised enough capital through private placement markets to give each of its 30 teams $30 million in financial assistance. Will teams use that money to support their most vulnerable employees or simply to pad their bottom lines? As Washington Wizards star Bradley Beal tweeted out, that’s the $30 million question.
The truth is, requiring professional athletes to wait their turn isn’t a huge ask. The U.S. Olympic Committee (not an organization known for its political wisdom) has already indicated that its athletes should not expect expedited vaccinations ahead of the 2021 summer games, and every professional league should follow their lead. Professional athletes skipped the line enough during the pandemic. Now, it’s time for them to wait their turn.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP:
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . The NFL’s decision-making process during the pandemic, and how the league came to embrace a frightening new normal? “How Did the NFL Get Into This Mess?” by Mary Harris (interview with Bomani Jones) in Slate (December 7, 2020).
. . . The United States’ reversal on punishing athletes for political protest on the world stage? “U.S. Will Not Punish Olympic Athletes for Peaceful Protests” by Andrew Keh and Gillian R. Brassil in The New York Times (December 10, 2020).
. . . How the power of kneeling has made its way to English soccer’s second division? “English Soccer Players Take a Knee” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (December 9, 2020).