NBA Vaccination Debate

On Monday at the Barclays Center, home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, the arena was alight with a buzz and energy not seen since before the Covid-19 pandemic. It was the NBA’s annual media day, a circus of sorts where reporters pepper their local basketball teams’ players, coaches, and executives with a variety of questions, from technical game related details to trade related gossip and everywhere in between. The atmosphere in Brooklyn felt much more tense than in recent years, partially due to their status as NBA championship favorites, but also due to the absence of one of their most important players, enigmatic superstar point guard Kyrie Irving. Due to New York City’s Covid-19 laws banning residents from large indoor events without one dose of the vaccine, Kyrie was forced to take his media day questions via a Zoom call, with the same rule threatening his status to play in home games in Brooklyn this season. He answers plenty of questions about basketball, life, his offseason, but declines to answer anything regarding his vaccination status, saying “I would like to keep it private” multiple times throughout the interview. While possibly the most high-profile case, Kyrie was just one of the many NBA players who expressed hesitancy about the vaccine over the past months, setting the stage for the biggest issue in the league at the moment, the vaccination debate.

Andrew Wiggins, a highly paid wing for the Golden State Warriors is in a similar situation to Mr. Irving. San Francisco has a law similar to that of NYC’s coming into effect on October 13th, so while Andrew was able to attend the media day in person, if he doesn’t get vaccinated he risks not being able tom play home games as well along with forfeiting millions in game checks. When asked about this situation during his media session he bluntly said “It’s my problem. Not yours.”, taking a similar route to other unvaccinated players across the league. Some however, like Orlando Magic forward Jonathan Isaac, have been quite a bit more vocal about their vaccine opinions. He spoke of famous unvaccinated individuals being “vilified” in the media and pushed heavily on the right to vaccine privacy. While this poignant minority exists the majority of players have been vaccinated, with an estimated 90% leaguewide vaccination rate at the time of this piece being written. Some, like NBA superstar Rudy Gobert, whose team, the Utah Jazz, are 100% vaccinated, cited wanting to support the team and focus on the game as his reasoning, “It is cool that we have the whole group and that everyone is ready, making sure that we aren’t making that a distraction for the team,”. Other players have a more personal reasons for choosing to get vaccinated. NBA superstar Karl Anthony Towns has lost six family members to the virus, including his mother, leading for him to be one of the leading advocates in the league for vaccination. Recently he lashed out on Twitter on those who still choose to not take the vaccine posting, “Every day I see a new excuse why people ain’t getting the vaccine. Ya starting to get creative with these “reasons” though and it’s actually really funny.”.

Ever since the pandemic began in full swing in the United States, it seems to have been repeatedly tangled with the NBA. For many, the pandemic “began” when on March 11th, 2020, the NBA suspended its entire season when the previously mentioned Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus, being the first of many cancellations of sports leagues across the country. The NBA was also possibly one of the most creative in terms of finding ways to play during the pandemic, as they were the first sports league to engineer the “bubble” idea and used it to finish out the 2019–2020 season. The 2020–2021 season was marked with daily testing, strict travel and mask regulations, and a large quantity of Covid related absences from players.

Many of the league’s issues with vaccination struggles lines up with current nationwide trends. At the current moment, African American men are the leading demographic of unvaccinated individuals across the country, with the NBA itself having a majority male African American player base. However, vaccine and medical skepticism in the African American community is not unfounded. Many studies have shown that due to implicit bias and other racially based factors, African Americans receive worse healthcare on average in comparison to white Americans and even other minority groups. Also, there has been a history of medical experimentation on African American individuals in this country. From 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted out of Tuskegee University, a HBCU in Georgia. There, CDC scientists infected around 400 African Americans with syphilis and left it purposely untreated to study the effects, leaving many of the subjects with lifelong health issues and also caused around 100 deaths. However, one must wonder, in a league where many players have deep invasive surgeries on ligaments and inject performance enhancing drugs into their system, is it fair for these same players to then be skeptical about COVID vaccines? However, there is one thing for certain, as this upcoming NBA season plays out, the coronavirus will continue to rear its ugly head, as it continues to do so in all facets of society.

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