Take a bow, Cole Beasley. You’re now the face of the NFL’s anti-vax movement.
Beasley, the Buffalo Bills receiver, has pulled no punches in expressing …
Take a bow, Cole Beasley. You’re now the face of the NFL’s anti-vax movement. Beasley, the Buffalo Bills receiver, has pulled no punches in expressing his disdain for the revised COVID-19 protocols devised by the NFL and the NFL Players Association — instituted for training camp and preseason at the moment, with more tweaks likely coming later — that draws a line in the sand between vaccinated players and the unvaccinated. If you’re vaccinated, you’re not required to wear a mask while at team headquarters and are no longer subjected to daily testing. You can hang out in the sauna, eat in the cafeteria and visit with friends and family while on road trips. If you’re not vaccinated, you might as well wear a red “X” on your forehead. You’ll be subjected to daily testing, must wear a mask at team headquarters and are banned from the sauna and steam room. You can’t eat in the cafeteria. And if you leave the team hotel to eat at a restaurant or interact with someone outside the team’s traveling party during a road trip, you’ll be subject to a $50,000 fine. Yes, the NFL and union made the point clear: They want the players vaccinated. “This is crazy,” Beasley responded in a Twitter post. “Did we vote on this? I stay in the hotel. We still have meetings. We will all be together. Vaccinated players can go out of the hotel and could bring covid back to where I am. So, what does it matter if I stay in the hotel now? 100 percent immune with vaccination? No. The players association is a joke. Call it something different. It’s not for the players.” Of course, Beasley, like colleagues across the league and Americans at large, has every right not to get vaccinated to protect himself from the novel coronavirus that has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 U.S. citizens and millions more throughout the world. Yet slamming the NFLPA over this one is way off-base. Why not slam the league, too? For Beasley to take shots at the union over this is both silly and unfair. Actually, the NFLPA deserves some credit for working hand-in-hand with the league — and not always in Kumbaya fashion — since the pandemic started to work out the protocols and work rules.
