Relax!

 It may be roughing the quarterback to pile on when he's down, but....

I don't think there are too many people out there to whom I need to explain this news item: Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers was pulled from Sunday's football game after testing positive for COVID-19. This after teammates Davante Adams, Allen Lazard, and Malik Taylor were placed on the "reserve/COVID-19" list in October.

You can't keep 6' (2m) distance between players in American football, so the National Football League has devised supposedly strict protocols to keep COVID-19 from spreading like wildfire among them; and it now appears that Rodgers has been flouting those protocols. Asked at a press conference last summer whether he had been vaccinated against the coronavirus, Rodgers claimed "Yeah, I'm immunized" — a weasel word nobody caught at the time.

Rodgers now claims that he couldn't take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines because his doctors told him he was allergic to some ingredient in them, and that he (like many others once a Michigan woman died from a rare complication after receiving the J&J vaccine last April) didn't trust the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Rodgers is within his rights under NFL protocols not to get vaccinated, for whatever reason he fancies, but those protocols require unvaccinated players to wear a mask at press conferences and on the sideline at games, to travel separately from the rest of the team, and not to mingle socially with more than three fellow NFL team members at a time.

Rodgers has violated just about every one of those rules.

Rodgers went on Pat McAfee's podcast to complain that he's the unfair victim of a cancel culture woke mob that refused to get vaccinated when Donald Trump was president. (I don't remember things that way, unless we're talking about Trump's recommendations to ingest bleach and shine light up our butts.) Rodgers explained that he is under the expert medical care of former Surgeon General Joe Rogan and has been declared completely free of horse worms.

Rodgers's robust popularity in Packerland has been sacked in its own end zone since all of this came out; a Madison medical clinic has dropped Rodgers as its commercial spokesjock, and, judging from the ads on Sunday's game, Jake from State Farm appears to be pivoting away from offering a Rodgers Rate, too.

I can't speak for the hit on Rodgers's popularity within the sizeable base of anti-vaxxer Trump l'oeilists in Packerland, of course.

I suspect that those people are convinced that the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs yesterday.

Bigly.