Grandpa Rodgers Is STILL Wrong About COVID

I was listening to sports radio Saturday.

Yes, I realize the Venn diagram between PhD-holding political behavioralists and people listening to former NFL players bullshit about football on Saturday morning in the saddest part of August has got to be pretty fucking small. But I still kick it old school in the truck.

And somehow I found myself listening to sports analysts reporting on Aaron Rodgers’s COVID victory lap.

Earlier in the week, Rodgers had gone on The Pat McAfee Show and attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, calling him an “absolute coward” after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions in Rand Paul’s latest congressional investigation of him. Rodgers went further, suggesting Fauci was a criminal and declaring himself on the “right side of history.”

Then the story filtered down into the rest of sports radio. The show I happened to catch featured former NFL players trying to make sense of what had happened, and listening to people who don’t spend their lives following politics or epidemiology dissect it, I realized something terrible: far, far, far more people will hear Rodger’s lies than will ever here this truth.

One of the great forgotten facts of COVID is that the United States never really had one pandemic response. We had 50.

In March 2020, with Americans dying and doctors still trying to understand a brand-new virus, Donald Trump was already talking about reopening the country by Easter. Republican governors followed. Georgia began reopening gyms, barbershops, salons and other businesses on April 24. Texas reopened stores, movie theaters and indoor restaurant dining on May 1. The federal government provided recommendations, but in America the actual rules governing daily life depended enormously on which side of a state line you happened to live on.

I experienced this myself. I lived in in Virginia in 2020 and traveled to Austin, Texas that summer, and they might as well have been different countries.

In Virginia, you couldn’t go anywhere without a mask. Restaurants operated under restrictions, inside seating was closed, capacity was limited, and distancing rules were everywhere. For much of the early pandemic, life basically consisted of grocery stores, takeout and drive-thrus.

Then I went to Austin. Restaurants were open. Bars were packed. People were eating and drinking indoors like there was no such thing as COVID. The nice hotel I stayed at was taking COVID seriously—because, presumably, its customers expected it—but stepping outside felt like entering an alternate reality where the pandemic barely existed.

Except, of course, the pandemic did exist. People were still dying from it.

That was the bizarre American experiment: same country, same virus, radically different responses. In much of Europe, including France, governments imposed national restrictions. America allowed governors to make dramatically different decisions about how much viral transmission they were willing to tolerate in the name of “freedom.”

And viruses don’t give a shit about freedom.

By 2021, however, something fundamental had changed. Scientists, heroes like Dr. Fauci had given us a weapon vastly more powerful than restaurant closures, capacity limits or mask mandates: vaccines that dramatically reduced the risk that a COVID infection would put you in the hospital or kill you.

The COVID vaccines were never magic force fields. Their ability to prevent infection declined over time, particularly as new variants emerged. But preventing every infection was never the most important measure of their success. The vaccines’ great achievement was keeping infected people from becoming severely ill and dying because people were doing it daily in the thousands. In January of 2021 we were seeing on average 3,409 friends, neighbors, co-workers, teachers, health care workers, marathon runners, and especially grandparents.

We could see the effect of the COVID vaccines almost immediately. An NIH-supported analysis estimated that vaccination prevented approximately 139,000 American deaths in just the first five months of the rollout. And that was only through May 2021, before Delta and Omicron would expose tens of millions more Americans to the virus.

But America did something extraordinarily stupid with this lifesaving technology: we turned it into a political identity.

Republican politicians, conservative media personalities and right-wing influencers spent months transforming vaccination from a medical decision into another front in the culture war. Masks were submission. Mandates were tyranny. Public-health officials were villains. Fauci became some kind of comic-book supervillain. And people like Aaron Rodgers became heroes for refusing to comply.

Which gives us an unusually clean way to evaluate the claim that Rodgers ended up on the “right side of history.”

We don’t have to ask him.

History kept receipts.

Researchers eventually linked individual voter-registration records in Florida and Ohio to mortality records, allowing them to compare Republican and Democratic excess deaths before and after vaccines became available.

After May 1, 2021, Republican voters experienced an excess-death rate 43% higher than Democratic voters. Even more damning, researchers found that the partisan mortality gap was larger in Trump counties with lower vaccination rates.

That is one of the most extraordinary political findings of my lifetime because there is no ambiguity about the dependent variable here. This isn’t a survey asking Republicans and Democrats whether they felt healthier. It isn’t a poll asking whether they believed vaccines worked. It isn’t Anthony Fauci making a prediction on television.

It’s who fucking died.

This is where the international comparison makes the American story even harder to ignore.

France got COVID too. France had lockdowns, restrictions, political arguments, vaccine skeptics and plenty of people who hated what their government was doing. The French certainly didn’t suddenly become a nation famous for unquestioning obedience to the government.

But France had something America never had: a substantially more uniform national pandemic response. And when vaccines arrived, France did not develop anything approaching America’s enormous partisan divide in vaccination.

SUB HERE!!!

Look at what happened after vaccines became widely available.

From May 2021 through the end of 2023, the United States accumulated roughly 2,842 excess deaths per million people, compared with roughly 1,268 per million in France.

More than twice the rate.

Same virus. Same planet. Access to the same basic medical breakthrough. Very different outcomes.

America buried a hell of a lot more people than France which largely had a national response and no political party pushing misinformation.

None of this means every pandemic policy was correct. Public-health officials made mistakes. Scientific recommendations changed as scientists learned more about a virus humanity had never encountered before. Some restrictions were more effective than others, and school closures in particular deserve serious scrutiny. Congress also has every right to conduct legitimate oversight of decisions made during the pandemic.

But none of those things establishes what Aaron Rodgers now wants people to believe.

Fauci invoking the Fifth Amendment in 2026 does not retroactively change a death certificate from 2021. Rand Paul accusing Fauci of crimes does not resurrect someone who rejected vaccination and died during Delta. A congressional hearing cannot make the Republican excess-mortality gap disappear.

And Aaron Rodgers calling Fauci a coward on The Pat McAfee Show certainly cannot change what happened.

The COVID vaccines worked. They saved lives. The United States then allowed vaccination itself to become politicized to an extent that was extraordinary among wealthy democracies, and the Americans most exposed to that political campaign disproportionately refused vaccination.

Then they disproportionately died.

Aaron Rodgers can keep going on television and declaring victory. Rand Paul can keep hauling Anthony Fauci before Congress. Republicans can investigate him, threaten him with prosecution and spend another six years trying to convince Americans that the scientists were the villains and the anti-vaxxers were the heroes.

But we already ran the experiment.

We watched different states make different choices about mitigation. We watched vaccines arrive. We watched vaccination divide along partisan lines. We watched the partisan mortality gap emerge after those vaccines became universally available. And we can compare America’s death toll with countries where vaccination never became the same kind of partisan loyalty test.

We know what happened because we counted the bodies.

Politicians can hold hearings. Podcasters can rewrite history. Sports radio can declare a winner. Aaron Rodgers can lie all he wants.

But there is one witness they can’t bully, subpoena or cross-examine:

The Trump supporters who listened to MAGA’s lies and ended up dead.

Special Note: Rodgers and MacAfee’s lies spent all of last week being heard by millions who will never hear the truth. Please help me spread this info among sports fans.

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