You can count DeAndre Hopkins as someone who doesn't agree with this approach. What do you think about this?

@DeAndreHopkins : Never thought I would say this, But being put in a position to hurt my team because I don’t want to partake in the vaccine is making me question my future in the @Nfl


Full Memo.

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Forcing people to take a vaccine, which they have no idea if it’s safe. Oh, they CLAIM it is. But what are these claims based on? Not on SCIENCE. Just “Trust us! It’s SAFE!”
They have drugs that they take YEARS to test before they will OK them for people to take. Even drugs for people that have terminal diseases, that have nothing to lose. They can’t get the drugs because they haven’t made it through the years of trials.
But we are supposed to take these untested drug, based on WHAT???
No one should be forced to take them.

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It's amusing that the "personal responsibility" crowd is upset that teams and players should be... held responsible... for their actions?

Listen, in all seriousness, playing football is a privilege, not a right. If any of the players think the risk of the receiving vaccine outweighs the risk not getting it, they're welcome to not get it. There is (at the moment at least) no requirement for players, coaches, or anyone else to get vaccinated.

Being a professional football player means sharing the same space with tens of thousands of people, and traveling around the country. If players, for whatever reason, don't want to get vaccinated, they should take precautions to not get or spread covid. If they don't do that, they should be held responsible for their actions.

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The NFLPA might make this very interesting, especially if they file suit in the right jurisdiction.

Further, the vaccines don't prevent the disease...they prevent those who get the disease from getting sicker than they otherwise would have. If vaccinated players test positive, they still test positive.

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Umm, I'm going to say nothing? Because there is no requirement to get vaccinated?

But more specifically, since this rule has to do with covid "outbreaks", I imagine that a single player from each team would simply be isolated from the team until they no longer test positive. IE: same rules as last year.

From what I understand, unvaccinated players will need to be tested, again similar to last year, so it should be relatively easy to keep outbreaks from happening, unless there is a team that doesn't test or something like that and ignores it.

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I'm not sure about this, but if I'm a player, I would be kind of pissed this comes out three weeks after the 2021 opt-out deadline. This might have influence several players who are not comfortable with the vaccine to opt-out. Now they are with one less option at their disposal.

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NFL Covid restrictions

so how often do they test the vaccinated players? And what happens if THEY test positive. And what about players who had it/have antibodies?

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I'm not sure how likely that is, or rather, how many people that applies to. There were relatively few opt-outs in 2020, and that was before we had a vaccine, when testing was very limited, etc. At this point, if players are surprised that there are rules that punish careless behavior...

In any case, I'm not going to feel sorry for millionaires that have to make the "difficult" decision to earn millions more dollars and, you know, take basic precautions, wash their hands, avoid hanging out at clubs, and the like, vs sitting out the season without pay so they can do whatever it is they would rather do.

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Good questions, I don't have the answers and I'm not sure how well defined it is from the NFL's perspective, but I'll take a guess:
1. How often for vaccinated players? Probably whenever they come into contact with known individuals who have tested positive. Possibly randomly or every week or two, I'm curious to know as well. I bet this will be clarified soon.

2. What happens if they test positive? Probably the same thing with unvaccinated players, they would need to quarantine. It mentions they won't need to if they're simply exposed to, but I would imagine that players who have been exposed to it would be tested, and if negative, wouldn't need to quarantine. I don't know the specifics here but this seems straightforward. If I was running a facility I would test everyone (vaccinated or not) as soon as a single person tests positive.

While it's possible to get and transmit covid if you've been vaccinated, the prevailing thought is that it should happen (perhaps much) less frequently. I think we're waiting on clinical trials that study spread rate for vaccinated folks to say for certain. But we know the vast majority (something like 98%) of those who are getting covid now are unvaccinated, and it's likely that unvaccinated individuals are spreading it at the highest rates.

In any case, if you're a football player and traveling the country, entertaining hundreds of thousands of people, it would be reasonable to continue taking the same general precautions even if you're vaccinated. So whether there should be special exceptions for those who are vaccinated is certainly a debatable point.

3. Players with antibodies who are not vaccinated - that's an interesting sub-group. I imagine the concern there is how likely they are to get mutations of the virus, like the delta variant, which the vaccines so far look pretty well suited to handle - the Pfizer and Moderna ones at least. It's probably a difficult to gauge/test and perhaps rather small group as well, so I can understand why there aren't special rules for this group.

Now back to the main topic of the thread. I look at the outbreak rule as more or less a "don't be completely incompetent" sort of rule. The NFL managed to play all of the games last year, a somewhat remarkable feat, and there were only a handful instances where the outbreaks were so bad that games were in doubt. With the majority of players already vaccinated (65% with one shot, as of about a month ago), outbreaks should be less likely to occur, so it's possible that the rule ends up being a non-issue. Plus, the NFL really, really likes money, and really, really doesn't want to miss even a single game.

But "Unlikely scenario which the NFL will do everything in its power to prevent, has consequences" is a much less compelling headline.

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This is all about nothing... how many games did the fail to reschedule last year? Oh yeah that's right, zero...

And last year with no vaccines is probably worse than this year with some vaccines.

Sure some players will miss games, but I don't think entire teams (but I could be mistaken).


But either way, you make millions, to tough it up buttercup!

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