Commissioner Adam Silver’s recent comments sounded a lot like he was floating the idea of getting players vaccinated early
If that’s the intent, you have to acknowledge Silver’s audacity — but also his stupidity.
The postponements also don’t reflect the zombie games — the games on the schedule where much of a team’s roster is out for one reason or another, but a team still has the requisite eight players to play on. That leads to some bad basketball and unfair situations for teams on both ends of the bargain.
The NBA even now sends out security postgame, to stand mid-court to prevent players from handshakes and hugs after the game. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, given that the players were sharing the court for the two hours before, but it shows some of the desperation the league has in stopping the spread of the virus within its ranks.
I understand Silver’s urgency in wanting his players to get vaccinated. And yet, the NBA’s problems are not unique, nor are they particularly urgent. Every business in America has had to deal with the ramifications of coronavirus. And I’d go so far as to say that the majority of those ramifications were more significant than postponed basketball games.
Silver’s argument is simple: that vaccinating players wouldn’t just save the league some trouble, it would also lead to increased vaccination among African Americans.
“Several public health officials — and this is operating state by state right now — have suggested there would be a real public health benefit to getting some very high-profile African Americans vaccinated to demonstrate to the larger community that it is safe and effective,” he said.
“After accounting for country-specific age structure, age-contact structure, infection fatality rates, and seroprevalence, as well as the age-varying efficacy of a hypothetical vaccine, we found that across countries those aged 60 and older should be prioritized to minimize deaths.”
In sum: Yes, giving vaccination priority to the NBA’s cohort of 20- to 40-year-olds would result in additional deaths compared with giving those vaccines to elderly or other at-risk populations as planned. Full stop.
I’m all on board for NBA players being vaccinated when their turn comes, and I’m sure teams and the league will coordinate it so that they’re quickly in and out of local vaccination centers. I’m even supportive of making a little bit of a scene about it, showing that these prominent members of our community are believers in science.
But jumping the queue? No way. Let’s shut that idea down now, before the scoreboard of good thinking has a chance to register what happened.
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