Q Toon: An Aaron Judgment

In an episode of a podcast called "Look Into It" hosted by conspiracy fabulist Eddie Bravo, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in cahoots with the Center for Disease Control and the federal government, was responsible for exacerbating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980's and repeated their strategy with COVID-19.

I don't care to link to the February 23 podcast itself, which is behind a paywall anyway; but this little germ from the three-hour episode escaped the lab last week and went viral on Xitter:

"The blueprint was created in the '80's: create a pandemic, you know, with a virus that's goin' wild. Right? Only — he was given — Fauci was given, like, over $350 million dollars to research this, come up with drug that was new or repurposed to handle the AIDS pandemic, and all they came up with was AZT. And if you do any smidge of research — and I know, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not an immunologist, whatever the fuck — I can read, though, right? — right — I can look things up and I can learn just like any normal person, you know, I can do my own research, which is so vilified, you know, to even question authority — but that was the game plan back then: create an environment where only one thing works. Back then, AZT. Now, rembisivir, remdesivir, until we get a vaccine. Which, by the way, Anthony Fauci had stake in rembirvi vaccine."

Rodgers was repeating false claims by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that the CDC suppressed all sorts of supposed cures in order that favored yet fatal medical treatments would hold a monopoly on the HIV/AIDS/COVID market. These claims have been debunked by PolitiFact (and if you're into doing your own research, there are dozens of sources cited at the end of that post).

Dan Wilson, senior associate scientist at Janssen and host of the YouTube show “Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson,” said Kennedy’s retelling of the AZT history was “dead wrong.”

Kennedy and Rodgers were “repeating a form of HIV/AIDS denialism, where antiretroviral drugs are said to be ineffective against progression of the virus,” Wilson said. In reality, he said, AZT “was the first time that doctors could do something to help people who (were) wasting away and dying painful deaths.”

Now, I'm all in favor of doing one's own research. It's incumbent upon any responsible editorial cartoonist to check into the veracity of things before whipping off a cartoon about whatever one just heard from a talking head on TV or read in some piece of Xeet on Xitter.

But one must be aware that the internet is programmed to give you confirmation bias. If you google "aliens built pyramids," you will get hundreds of links to articles positing that aliens built the pyramids. (Well, of course they did. Having spent decades traveling light years to visit the only flat planet in the universe, what else were they to do?)

But returning to the topic at hand: As a devoted Green Bay Packers fan, I'm saddened to see Aaron Rodgers follow the Brett Favre playbook of going to the Jets only to becoming a huge embarrassment to everyone who ever rooted for him. The guy is, or at least has been, a bright, intelligent fellow; remember how he whipped Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary's and astronaut Mark Kelly's butts on Jeopardy! in spite of getting the Final Jeopardy clue about Harley Davidson wrong? You can't credit that to clicker reflexes alone!

That was nine years ago, however; and perhaps it's true that he has been knocked to the turf a couple times since then.

But over his years with the NFL, he has gotten pretty full of himself. In his last years with the Packers, he didn't deign to pre-season practice with the rest of the team, meaning that new receivers and running backs spent half a season getting used to his habits and rhythms. And it showed.

Please, Lord, let Jordan Love model himself after Bart Starr instead.