With regards to Rodgers not wearing a max during pressers, from a Defector blog today:
Rodgers has been doing his press conferences indoors, without a mask on, for most of this season. The protocol requires that “all players and staff who are not fully vaccinated must wear masks (surgical masks are preferred; gaiters and masks with valves or vents are prohibited) at all times when inside the Club facility.”
There is no exception for press conferences or interviews listed, but this might be another gray area, because Rodgers is not the only unvaccinated player in the NFL to do an indoor press conference without wearing a mask. In an earlier version of the protocol, unvaccinated players were also required to wear masks outdoors. An NFL spokesperson told me the outdoor rule was removed July 30, when the league’s medical personnel determined that the risk of transmission was far less outdoors than indoors. When media availabilities first began at the start of training camp, most teams held interviews outdoors, so neither vaccinated or unvaccinated players wore masks during interviews. When things moved indoors, the mask served as a scarlet letter of player’s vaccination status.
The NFL spokesperson would not clarify for me what the current protocol is for indoor press conferences, and the Packers didn’t respond to my emailed question. I talked to a couple PR staffers for other NFL clubs to try to figure this out, and my best understanding is that when teams switched to indoor interviews, they stopped requiring players to wear masks because the optics are better. One PR person told me the league has not fined any of their club’s unvaccinated players for doing pressers without a mask on, but they are now worried they may have been breaking a rule and not knowing it. A spokesperson for the NFLPA said that the indoor mask rule is “unchanged from last year for unvaccinated players” but did not provide further clarification on how that applies to press conferences.
One place there’s no gray area is that NFL protocol requires all media to be vaccinated in order to participate in press conferences or interviews. So I have an educated guess about Rodgers’s maskless appearances on the podium. As Rodgers claimed on the Pat McAfee show today, “the only time I haven’t worn my mask is when I am around all vaccinated people.” I assume he’s deeply grateful that reporters are willing to do the work of getting vaccinated so that he doesn’t have to.
