Aaron Rodgers Clears the Air on "Immunized" Controversy

the jurogan experience yeah it's been an interesting uh year or so but man it's been it's been a good year what was the the craziness like like when all the people were calling you a plague rat and i mean it's it's you and how do you say the guy's name the tennis player novak djokovic yeah djokovic i mean we talk about the healthiest human beings on earth professionally in the us open now yeah i know because of this which is bananas the guy's already had kovid recovered from it i think he had it twice yeah and he's one of the best athletes in the world i mean the guy's body's in tip-top conditions players are oh credible fitness incredible yeah yeah and no you can't come you didn't follow the rules like it's it defies science defies logic it doesn't make any sense none of it makes sense especially at this stage of the the pandemic air quotes i mean what the [ __ ] man what was it like for you it was it was really difficult for sure and a lot of different reasons i think i knew that this was coming down that at some point i was going to talk about my status because i'd chosen to not get vaxxed for reasons that you talked about on your show and i talked about on we should just say it because uh it's kind of important you you're allergic to a medication or a part of the vaccine right what is it called peg polyethylene glycol and uh so i did my research um i now i think typically speaking because i'm healthy and i take care of myself getting vaccinated was not on the top of my list but you know i wanted to look into it because everybody was doing it and talking about it and and trying to be safe and i wanted to make sure i was you know doing my part if that's what was necessary to keep myself safe and my loved ones safe and my teammates safe then i looked into it and at the time i went on the cdc website and they specifically said you know if if you're allergic to pg we do we do not recommend you get vaccinated with the mrna vaccinations so the only other one available is johnson johnson and it just got pulled at the time for blood clots so i looked into other options which included an immunization process through a holistic doctor and i researched and talked to probably a dozen different md's and found a protocol that i felt like was was the best available and what is that what what's involved in that it involved um basically uh a couple month process of taking a diluted um strand of the virus so i was doing basically what the vaccine is supposed to do without how do they do that i don't know the the the exact way that they did that but um but it was by injection no no it was it was um it was oral and how are they even getting a diluted strand of the virus i don't i don't know that exactly or want to get into that exactly i don't think but um but there was uh hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people that i knew in this circle that that we're using that have been doing this to protect ourselves because we were thinking hey look uh yeah for me i didn't want to risk anaphylactic shock uh or any type of clotting with you know associated with the vaccine so um so that was my only option either do nothing or do this process and i felt like that this was the best way to protect myself and my teammates and that the nfl would understand you know and maybe grant me a waiver because one of the most difficult parts about the whole process was that there was clearly two classes of player at the facility there was the vaxxed and the unvaxed and the vax had full privileges they tested once every two weeks they had full privileges on the road they could go out to dinner on the road they could go to a concert in town they could go to a comedy show that was it was in town they could be at any place they wanted to right and live life normally non-vaxxed fully masked zero privileges on the road could not go into establishments more than 15 people you cannot be around more than uh three uh the three individuals from the team outside the facility all these different what i think now we all realized were crazy uh policies and that's what actually got me in into into trouble was that i attended a halloween party in a 10 000 square foot warehouse with 18 other individuals all fully vaccinated and myself not vaxxed and was eventually fined for that end up getting covered from a vaccinated teammate of mine who contracted covid and spread it and that's where it gets a little bit crazy and i told this story i think on the mcphee show but i said when i came to camp they knew i was not vaccinated right so you had to you had to submit a vaccination card that went to the system with the nfl and obviously i didn't have one so i was given we were given wristbands too so everybody in the facility knew who was vaxxed and who wasn't vaxxed vaxxed was green non-vex was yellow so already it's weird yeah you know like wearing your colors out there and i think you know to to do an aside here there was a lot of shaming involved in it there was a lot of public shaming that was attempted to coerce people to get vaccinated because not only you're wearing a yellow wristband you're the only ones wearing masks and you you have to work out by yourself can't work out with your teammates so no drills nothing well you could at practice but weight room stuff or our weight room every day we're working out on the side just the seven of us not back is it because practice is outside and the weight room is inside is it easily yeah but so they knew my vaccination status from the start as did all my teammates it was a lot of talk about i endangered my teammates and you know i lied to my teammates and my team from day one that i returned which was july 25th probably of 2021 they knew where i was at everybody did also on the side i had an appeal going with the nfl because i said look here's my health issues here's the protocol i went through here's the research behind it gave him 500 pages of research from a number of people that put together case review studies around homeopathy and immunizations and safety in them and also the efficacy of them and then i had a conversation with the league and the league said in this conversation this one i knew that my appeal was definitely not going to happen was they said it's not possible for a vaccinated player a person sorry to contract or transmit codeword if they've been vaccinated and i said you got to be kidding me because i showed up and five people non-players five people fully vaxxed are out with covid so what are you talking about and he said you're a conspiracy theorist oh boy and i said no i just think i'm a realist i'm just looking at the facts here like what point in the pandemic was this this was like beginning of august 2021 so by then they had already known that breakthrough infections were real by then it had already i mean the the vaccines started being rolled out um was it when what was the first year it was january of 2020 where they started getting them to older people right no right i'm sorry january 2021 rather sorry yeah january 2021 they started giving out to older people wasn't that they started rolling out in march and april because that's when i was going through the process of researching and looking into what i could do right to protect myself having the you know the allergy that and by august people were still they were already getting it even though they had been vaccinated so this was not you know it wasn't talked about i don't think a whole lot right but it was four months and it was definitely happening so it was definitely happening yeah yeah i had only known one person at that time somewhere around april that had been vaccinated and also garcovet and i just thought it was an aberration i didn't based on what i saw in the first few weeks at the facility and that's why i thought there was an opportunity um but it was difficult because we were separated there's a whole other situation that was going on that uh you know also was going on in in the rest of society is that my non-vax teammates who were on the bubble right so 53 guys make the active roster 16 on the practice squad so the 69 guys in the squad there's 90 in camp right so of the i say seven i think there's about 10 guys not vaxxed only a few of us were guaranteed roster spots like we were going to be on the team and there's a lot of bubble guys the general managers and there was there was talk around the league out general managers were not going to keep bubble non-vax players right so they're already up against it not only did the non-vax players have a harder chance of making the squad but they also had an almost zero percent opportunity to get a workout afterwards so if you get cut right and the season starts every tuesday during the football season most teams will bring in anywhere from five to 15 guys for workouts just to see who's out there is there any players that can add to the roster so if you weren't vacs do you had a very low percentage not just of keeping a job but even getting a job opportunity like a you know a workout which is wild and so after this conversation with the league i knew that my appeal was going away and they were doing this i called it a witch hunt you know where they were asking every single player are you vaccinated you know they're asking a bunch of big quarterbacks and some guys were saying you know it's you know you know it's personal or whatever you know i didn't want to talk about their status and almost guaranteed you weren't vaccinated right so then they were getting ripped and certain guys said yes i'm vaccinated and you know then they try to get them to say [ __ ] about their teammates you know who weren't vaccinated like dog their teammates out so i'd been ready the entire time for this question and had thought about how i wanted to answer it and i had come to conclusion i'm going to say i've been immunized and if there's a follow-up then talk about my process but thought there's a possibility that i say i'm immunized maybe they understand what that means maybe they don't maybe they follow up they didn't follow up so then i go the season them thinking some of them that i was vaccinated right because they fought the only follow-up they asked was basically asking me to rip on my teammates like what do you say to your teammates who are vaccinated like what kind of example do you feel like you're setting you know to your teammates or a vaccine i said it's everybody's own decision with their body and we're super healthy individuals we take care of ourselves we understand what goes in our bodies and i don't have any judgment on any decision that a guy makes with their own body right but i knew at some point if i contracted the covid or if word got out because it's the nfl and there's leaks everywhere it was possible i'd have to answer the questions and then sure enough i can track of it in uh at the beginning of november end of october um and that's when the [ __ ] storm hit because now i'm a liar i'm in you know endangering uh you know the community my teammates all these people and the you know you know that the attempted takedown of me and you know my word and my integrity uh began but um so that was that was difficult but i will say and and i'm thankful to be on this show like i really appreciate you and you helping me out during that time i reached out to you uh i think begin the season i feel like and just said hey because you talked about in your podcast a little bit you'd had some uh you know controversial maybe less controversial now um people on there talk a bit less controversial now talking about their uh you know they're actually people experts in the field talking about you know their own uh ideas about coveton and uh and you know you helped me with a uh you know a game plan to be ready in case i did get covered and and i followed it to a t and when i got covered you know within 36 hours i was you know symptom free and feeling amazing but the protocols was you're off for 10 days so i missed a game we lost a football game i came back had to answer a ton of questions about it obviously had my you know basically i lost you know the majority of allies i thought i had in the media the good thing is it drew a real line in the sand and everybody who wanted to jump on me and and trash me did and showed their true colors and very few people uh you know kind of in the media at least stuck by me you

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 2,531,397

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

Id: LlZ5Zwp09FI

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022