Earlier this summer, a conversation I was having with someone involved in sport meandered its way around to talking about Covid and vaccines and all that good stuff. It was idle chit-chat really and only came up because I had been in for my first jab the previous week. The person I was talking to kind of hesitated, as if unsure how to respond. “Yeah, I’ll probably get it at some stage,” came the reply.
I started into a bit of light-hearted teasing about anti-vaxxers and so forth, only to be met by a further pause. “Well, it’s just, em, we’re in the process of maybe, hopefully, having a baby and we’re talking to the doctor about it and it’s all just a bit up in the air at the moment, you know?” At which point I rushed to apologise and retreated from the conversation like it was a burning building and I was wearing runners filled with jet fuel.
All of which is to say that in the matter of Callum Robinson and the vaccine, none of us know what none of us know. Maybe he hasn't got the vaccine because of perfectly good and sane health reasons that are between him and his family and his doctor. Or maybe he hasn't got it because he read that thing about Nicki Minaj's cousin on Facebook.
Either way, it's never a good idea to be blithely litigating a stranger's health choices in public. In the past 24 hours, Robinson has been called every name imaginable, has faced calls to be thrown out of the Ireland squad until he sees the error of his ways and even, hilariously, had some of the higher-level geniuses online suggest he should be sacked from West Brom. Ain't no vaccine against that type of stupid.
It was going to happen eventually, of course. The strain of resistance to getting jabbed has been curiously strong among the athlete classes across many sports since the summer. Flick around the coverage of every sports league in every country – well, every rich country with the privilege of abundant vaccines – and you will find a version of Callum Robinson’s 24-hour spell in the headlines.
In the NFL, coaches Ron Rivera of the Washington Football Team and Brandon Staley of the LA Chargers both found frustration during the summer because their team rosters stood at less than 50 per cent of players willing to get vaccinated. The difference between their plight and the workaday gripes of other coaches is that both Rivera and Staley have recovered from cancer in recent years.
If you won’t get a vaccine to stay on the good side of the cancer-survivor coach who holds your all-too-brief playing career in his hands, there’s likely more than just laziness at play. It has to be more than the simple feeling of invincibility of a young athlete in peak physical shape. All these professional sporting organisations have access to wildly expensive medical staff. There is no shortage of good information.
And yet, as the head of the PFA, Maheta Molango, was pointing out over the weekend, there’s clearly no shortage of bad information either. “What we want is that people make an educated decision based on science. Don’t just believe all the myths and lies that circulate online. We can provide players with information from the specialists.
“The internet is full of all sorts of stuff. There is a lot circulating online about vaccinations. I think sometimes people are just misinformed. Don’t just say ‘I don’t want the vaccine’ without knowing all the information. If they have the right information then they can make an informed choice – they are adults so it is their choice in the end.”
This is clearly at the heart of some of the refuseniks' rationale for steering clear of the jab. If the chief executive of the players' union is bringing up the misinformation, then it is obviously having an effect. Reports of players' WhatsApp groups humming with anti-vax material went around last month and the Premier League and EFL took it seriously enough to get the club captains in on a presentation from Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, the UK's deputy chief medical officer. Yet still they hold out.
In a way, it’s mildly surprising that this has bubbled up now. When it comes right down to it, it’s really not important at this stage whether high-profile sportspeople get jabbed or not. You could plausibly have argued a couple of months back that they could do a lot of good as role models by loudly and publicly coming out and extolling the virtues of the vaccine but that’s really not a factor at this stage.
Huge swathes of the population here and in the UK are vaccinated. Whatever the reasons are behind the reluctance of some sportspeople to do so, it has clearly not made a blind bit of difference to the population at large. It wasn’t helpful in Stephen Kenny’s attempts to get Ireland to the Euros but that’s a different argument.
Indeed, very little of the pile-on Robinson has received over the past 24 hours has felt sport-related. It's all been a bit purer than pure, an intellectual shouting down of the dumb jock, an open-goal riddling of a footballer as being not just stupid but dangerous with it. When an Ireland player is deemed worthy of airtime on both Claire Byrne and Liveline, it's not because people are annoyed at his paltry record of one goal in 18 games for Ireland.
A massive vaccination programme has been more or less completed. Virtually all Covid restrictions are about to disappear over the coming weeks. The pandemic isn’t over but we are by no means as deep in the Covid mire as we have been in the past 20 months.
In that context, Robinson is entitled to feel a bit hard done-by here. He may very well have perfectly good health reasons for not getting the jab. Equally, he could be an ill-informed halfwit who is lost in conspiracy theory hell. Or maybe he’s somewhere between the two and hasn’t really given it a lot of thought.
The more interesting question at this point is, why should any of us care?
