[WAPO OPINION PIECE] The NBA pitches itself as progressive. But its stars won’t talk about vaccines.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/12/01/lebron-james-covid-nba/

The NBA pitches itself as progressive. But its stars won’t talk about vaccines.
LeBron James and others have been reluctant to urge immunization. Now breakthrough cases are on the rise.

By Matt Sullivan
Matt Sullivan is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone. He is the author of “Can’t Knock the Hustle: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets’ Superstars of Tomorrow.”
Today at 12:33 p.m. EST

A few hours before the Los Angeles Lakers took the court on Tuesday night, the National Basketball Association conveniently leaked a study produced by its rigorous coronavirus testing program, which spits out more virus data than most American employers do: 34 vaccinated players and staffers had a breakthrough infection in the last two months, and the antibody levels suggested that everyone — players and fans alike — should get booster shots.

The self-styled league of progressivism knew by then what its testing on Tuesday morning had privately revealed: LeBron James, the vaccinated Lakers superstar and the face of basketball, had tested positive. Twice, it turns out. In the NBA’s obfuscative code of covid, he had merely “entered the health and safety protocols.” But James could miss at least 10 days, which is what’s required of players with a confirmed case.

On the usually hyperactive @KingJames Instagram account, a 23-hour-old post promoting the Nike LeBron 9 signature sneakers vanished into the 24-hour cache of IG Stories. There were no selfies from the private jet home to quarantine. None of the usual emoji. Not a re-’Gram in sight from the students at the elementary school that LeBron built.

The silence was yet another potential sign of selective abdication by the king of cultural cachet. Before game-time, anti-vaccine leeches were already crawling into the feeds of fans who might ask themselves: “If even LeBron can still get covid, why do I still need to get a shot?”

As I reported for Rolling Stone in September, the pro-science NBA league office is trapped in a kind of double-blind bind: While only 3 percent of its players remain unvaccinated, many more never wanted to get a shot — and a powerful few made sure in collective bargaining that immunization would not be required.

The league, which reopened its 2020 season in a covid-proof bubble at Walt Disney World after shutting down to prevent an outbreak, would hope that superstars didn’t set a bad example and would pray for the delta variant to fade away as the 2021 season tipped off. But first, players were confronted about their vaccination status, to which an all-too-common reply — from public figures in the middle of a public health crisis — was to hide behind “a personal choice” and “my own research.”

When asked earlier this season if someone of his stature — by some measures the most influential public figure in America — wanted to encourage fans and followers to get vaccinated, James invented an even more ridiculous excuse: “We’re not talking about something that’s political, or racism, or police brutality, or things of that nature.” Telling people what to do with their bodies, he said, is “not my job.”

But of course the vaccine is “something that’s political.” James, in manicuring his image over the last decade as a competitive progressive who notoriously tweeted “u bum” at Donald Trump, has very much made it his business to talk about things of a political nature. Like the most cunning of centrist politicians, however, he speaks out only when it’s focus-group-guaranteed to make him look good, without getting in the way of his self-interest:

• James posted a photo on Twitter featuring his Miami Heat teammates wearing hoodies in solidarity with Trayvon Martin in 2012. And then two years later, he ignored the family of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, gunned down in a park five miles from where his Cleveland Cavaliers played ball. When I was reporting my book on the NBA, activism and coronavirus, the boy’s mother told me that James’s billionaire advocacy was “a dangerous game.”

• James said in 2018 that Trump didn’t “give a f--- about the people,” and a Fox News host sneered that he should “shut up and dribble.” By 2020, James tweeted about being “louder than EVER.” Yet when an NBA executive’s 2019 tweet in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong prompted a Chinese boycott of the NBA, the league could not find a voice in James, who helps drive millions in Nike’s China revenue. “We don’t need to be talking,” multiple people recall him telling NBA Commissioner Adam Silver in Shanghai.

• James has campaigned for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, sought counsel from Barack Obama and shilled for the Affordable Care Act in a 2014 public service announcement that he hoped would better educate young fans and African Americans about their health-care options. But despite his long record of activism that included public health, two league sources involved in this year’s NBA PSAs told me they wouldn’t dare ask James to promote the coronavirus vaccine.

The NBA bills itself as a new American pastime with liberal values. Without men in helmets or hats between the lines. With a 24/7 reality show beyond them. A cultural institution worth $10 billion rides or dies by its personalities. But the league has covered for its megastars one too many times in private to uphold its public ideals. And now people might actually die if the NBA’s role models, thrust into the most urgent new crisis of our time, keep refusing to occupy the leadership vacuum they filled throughout the Trump years.

After James was spotted partying maskless with Drake in May, the NBA released a nondenial denial statement to convince fans that he had been vaccinated. (By his own telling, James was skeptical of the shots until this season.) When James’s former superstar teammate Kyrie Irving decided in October to boycott New York City’s vaccine mandate and get kicked off his own team, Silver passed the buck to Mayor Bill de Blasio — then called it “a public service of sorts” for basketball influencers to suck it up and get vaxxed.

Meanwhile, hoopsters morphed into a persistent, boldfaced reminder of the breakthrough case — 10 players entered the NBA quarantine protocols in 11 days last month — and the league’s own doctors admit that organizations like theirs were intentionally slow to acknowledge it. “We know more about what happens to famous people,” Lisa Maragakis, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins who regularly consults league officials, told me. “Because of concern that it might discourage vaccination, some people were hesitant to really push the message out that breakthrough infections happen so often.”

The extremely online athlete may have made it his job to look slightly less invincible; the humanization of the NBA is what gives its stars their power. But covid has made us all less invincible together, and our hero gap is getting more urgent by the day: Omicron is coming on fast, and so are the holidays. Indeed, increased NBA testing after Thanksgiving travel is the only reason James discovered he had contracted the most A-list of breakthrough cases thus far.

And yet the latest CDC demographic data shows that Americans who identify as Black continue to be vaccinated at disproportionately low rates. A recent poll found that a majority of Americans — and especially young people — would rather have Joe Rogan over for turkey and the game than Anthony Fauci.
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conclusion

Facing renewed criticism from outspoken Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter on his dangerous game in China, James recently said Kanter was “definitely not someone I would give my energy to.” Maybe foreign policy isn’t a job for James; working for Nike is. But I’ve talked to NBA players about wading into culture wars since the beginning of the Trump administration, and their most consistent refrain is: If LeBron does it, I’ll follow. Which is to say nothing of his 180 million-plus followers on social media.

He may feel asymptomatic, but the unvaccinated and the vulnerable need James, not Rogan. “I’m not educated enough” is no longer a valid excuse when covid is happening inside you. And it’s not too much to ask of a king that he bestow enough energy to post three words on Instagram, not about his latest shoes but the most important shots ever taken: “Just do it.”​

 

Democracy dies in darkness

 

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fify

Democracy dies in darkness

 

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related

Draymond Green latest NBA star to join the All-Hypocrisy team when it comes to vaccines

https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/...0211002-nzl5sh5ijfbwloqjkahnoyyuxy-story.html

 

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So what?