Slate | S1: Today on the show, will the NBA find its season reshaped by COVID again? I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next? Stick around. During the last two seasons, it seemed like the NBA was handling the pandemic pretty well. The 2020 season got cut short, but it finished up inside the Disney bubble. The 2021 season had a pretty stringent testing regimen and pretty much went off without a hitch. But when negotiations happened over this season, the players union said a vaccine mandate was unequivocally off the table, even though referees and other NBA employees had agreed to one. When did you first hear that vaccination could be an issue with some of the players?
S2: I didn’t actually hear that it could be an issue, but I figured that it might cause is an issue for everybody else. Like, there was no reason for me to expect this particular group of people to be more or less enlightened than anybody else is on this matter. There are some things that a union is going to push back on, particularly in an industry like this one. And in this industry, you have to put this in your body is something that is never, ever going to be able to fly. It really is a slippery slope. I think for them in particular, because so much of their job does involve putting things in your body, you got at least had the option to say no if you want to do that. And so this is somewhere where as much as people can talk about the weakness of the National Basketball Players Association in different negotiations, this is one that they had to stand on and they stood on it. And I think that the owners ultimately understood that it was necessary that the players are going to stand on it because they didn’t try to bring them to the ground, right?
S1: Because your body is your livelihood. Right, right. What are the rules exactly for NBA players at this point? I mean, I recognize it’s different in different places because of the regional differences. But what did they eventually agree to after this tense negotiation with the players union?
S2: It’s increased testing. If you were not vaccinated, your locker, for example, has to be. I think it is literally as far as possible away from the rest of the team if you were not going to be vaccinated. I think there’s increased masking requirements if you’re not going to be vaccinated. I mean, they make it sound really inconvenient if there’s going to be the case now of what’s happened with the travel in the legs. And this is I actually think people are paying enough attention to this. So in New York City and in San Francisco, there have been local ordinances passed that basically you can’t come inside to a large indoor event. If you have not been vaccinated in New York, it requires one shot in San Francisco. I believe you have to be fully vaccinated in order to do that. Now we talk about this strictly in the context of those two places, but I don’t know why we’re assuming that that won’t be adopted by other places. If the delta or whatever else starts raging even more. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if you saw those places then make the same calls as these other cities have. And then when that happens, it’s going to be a lot to do is caught flat footed.
S1: That’s because whatever rules the NBA’s got in place, players are also going to be bound by the laws of whatever state they happen to be playing in. For some unvaccinated stars like Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn, restrictions in their home states mean they could be barred from home games. Let’s talk about some of the reasons people are giving, because I think it’s useful to just kind of listen to the players a little bit here. We’ve got Jonathan Isaac from Orlando Magic. He’s talking about natural immunity. He’s had COVID and he actually, I listen to this press conference he gave. He was incredibly clear and straightforward, and he was very angry at being misrepresented by some journalists he felt in this process.
S5: I would just I would start by saying that that I was pretty badly misrepresented. I’m not anti-vax, I’m not anti medicine, I’m not anti science.
S1: But he was basically saying, I have the utmost respect for health care workers. I’m not anti-vax, I’m making a choice for me.
S5: With that being said, it is my belief that the vaccine status of every person should be their own choice.
S1: And by the way, I already had COVID, and so I’m protected a little bit. What did you make of that?
S2: Well, the I already had it unprotected, like that’s that that begs follow up questions, right? Like how protected are you? When did it happen? Is not like, this is a it’s not like the chicken pox, right? You’re not about to be like, I’m good from here on out. Yeah, you can’t get it twice. Yeah, I mean, Lamar Jackson to tell you that, like, that’s not really how that one works. I. As someone who has heard Jonathan Isaac taught before and found him to sound ridiculous, I did not think that he necessarily sounded ridiculous on this one, even though he is taking an approach that I do not agree with. Where where I look at him and I’m like, OK, I get that you’re not worried about you. But this isn’t just about you. And I think that the the libertarian streak of a lot of the non the not even anti-vax broadly, but anti this particular vaccine right here is purely looking at it through the prism of themselves and not thinking about anybody else, like when we were doing the super hardcore social distancing thing, when the test was short and everything else reason was everyone was supposed to assume that they were an asymptomatic carrier and that to stop the spread is by not interacting any more than you absolutely had. Two people instead looked at that is, stay inside so you don’t catch it as opposed to stay inside so you don’t spread it. So you get guys like him who are only thinking about this in the context of catching it, not in the context of transmitting it.
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