NRL 2020: Anti-vaxxer saga highlights NRL’s stupidity, Paul Kent

Just when the season looked set to resume certain players have undermined the game from within and it’s an embarrassment, writes Paul Kent.

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Dylan Walker nearly died from a prescription drug overdose after a night partying went wrong.

Won’t have a needle to inoculate himself against the flu, though.

Every weekend players stick painkillers in their shoulders and in their ankles so they can be numbed enough to get on the field.

Won’t let anyone put a flu vaccine in them, though.

Sanity and reason have left the NRL.

All the players needed to do was nothing — stay home, stay silent, that’s it — and they would have emerged from the tunnel on May 28 to a chorus of cheers and admiration.

Yet they could not manage even that.

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Dylan Walker is one of the few NRL players to refuse the flu vaccine. Picture: AAP.

Instead, just when the season looked set to resume certain players have undermined from within. It is a breathtaking display of collective stupidity.

And, to show they are no smarter, the NRL humoured them.

The game embarrassed itself this week.

Government support is dwindling. Public support is rock bottom.

Who wants to be associated with this game, where they can’t even manage themselves?

To get approval for the May 28 resumption the NRL submitted a plan to federal and state governments. This was back when the Government was not being embarrassed by the NRL and there was genuine support from within, and part of that pledge to government was flu vaccinations for 100 per cent of the players.

The Rugby League Players Association, who support the players who want their money, agreed on this.

Then it began to unravel.

Anti-vaxxer Bryce Cartwright was the first player to refuse the flu shot due. Picture: AAP.

Bryce Cartwright was first.

Cartwright described himself as “pro-choice”.

“I stand for the freedom to choose what goes into our bodies,” he wrote on social media this week, explaining his refusal to be vaccinated.

The RLPA stayed mute. It could hardly admonish Cartwright given it had agreed in writing that all players would be vaccinated. And it believed, according to the RLPA, that the pledge to government was only ever a “process on the protocols”.

Cartwright comes late to the anti-vaxxing debate.

Wife Shanelle is a social influencer. What this means is she profits from her views on social media, without doing much else, and she posted this week that Cartwright initially disagreed with her views, “Then he read the package insert and a few pages of Dr Suzanne Humphries and saw vaccines under a different light”.

A package insert and a few pages from a discredited book and he goes against decades of medical evidence.

Good grief.

Still, his supporters called it an “informed choice”, which tells you all you really need to know about his supporters.

Samoa recently went through a measles outbreak due to poor vaccination rates. Picture: AFP.

Soon many of the game’s Polynesian players joined Cartwright. As best anyone could tell they were claiming cultural beliefs prevented them getting vaccinated.

I still can’t find any explanation why this is so.

I do know that this inherited belief is partly why, last September, Samoa suffered a measles outbreak that spread quickly across the island and infected 5700 people, mostly children.

Only 40 per cent of the population was vaccinated and the disease spread fast through those who were not vaccinated.

There was tragedy in their ignorance. The lack of vaccination meant 83 deaths, mostly children under five.

The World Health Organisation directly linked anti-vaccination messaging to the spread of the disease.

Since then Samoa has launched a vaccination campaign. Now more than 95 per cent of the population is vaccinated and there has not been a death.

Do the players know this? Why is their ignorance a defence?

But the embarrassment does not rest just with the players.

There are countless examples during this COVID-19 crisis of the NRL exposing its lack of intelligence and honour. Failing to bank the players’ distress fund money, short-changing the clubs on emergency funding …

It has already cost chief executive Todd Greenberg and chief financial officer Tony Crawford their jobs.

So, with just a gentle noise coming from the players who resisted vaccination, the NRL quietly crumbled like damp biscuits during the week.

Somewhere, behind a closed door, the NRL changed its pledge to government and quietly inserted a waiver in the document that, if signed, allowed players to take the field without the vaccination.

It might be worth reading that again.

After submitting its own rules to the government to show it could be trusted in the community, and getting government approval based on those rules, the NRL then quietly changed the rules to appease the players who did not want to abide by them.

Somebody at the NRL should be sacked over this.

The NRL needs more people as strong as ARLC Chairman Peter Vlandys. Picture: Getty Images.

Rules made up on the run is the perfect epitaph for the Commission era.

The disease at League Central is weakness. Nobody outside the ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys has the strength to make the right decision if it means it is a tough one.

Interim chief executive Andrew Abdo has had two big jobs since taking the big chair and underwhelmed in both.

For too long the NRL has hidden behind committees and highly paid consultants and as such they embarrass the game with their sins.

Queensland Health Minister Stephen Miles accused the NRL of lying to his government on ABC Radio yesterday.

“This was their plan, they came up with this, they put it to us,” Miles said.

Yet the NRL went and changed it. And the RLPA quickly supported it, despite also supporting 100 per cent inoculation.

The NRL act as though, if they all stay together on this, then no-one will call them on their lies and they can’t be accountable because nobody knows who is really to blame.

The players behave as if dumb decisions, if met with unanimous support, somehow makes it a smart decision because of their strength in numbers. Somebody tell them this is a safety precaution, not a pub fight.

Failed logic or agenda does not seem to count in their argument.

So their support of a few misinformed players remains unanimous even though it puts their return to work, and therefore their income, at risk.

Do they realise?

If nothing else, they follow the poor example set by head office.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has backed a ‘no jab no play’ approach for the flu shot. Picture: Getty Images.

So much work has been done to get the season resumption passed through government and yet the NRL, somewhere at management level, changes the agreement retroactively.

They changed it after Prime Minister Scott Morrison told 2GB this week that part of the rules in place was “no jab, no play”.

When met with the NRL’s new waiver clause yesterday NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said: “No individual, no organisation is above the health advice.

“All of us have worked too hard to see anyone flout the rules.”

She clearly was not a supporter.

Then the latest insult yesterday, when the Queensland Government was forced to step in to do what the NRL administration did not have the guts to do.

It told Cartwright and two others based in Queensland to stand down while the policy is reviewed.

You couldn’t make it up.

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***

The recent NFL three-day draft rated the highest it ever has on television.

If ever there was an example of an audience crying out for entertainment, that was it. The NFL is not scheduled to kick-off until September and even that is only if life in America quickly returns to normal, yet fans tuned in.

Tomorrow the UFC becomes the first global sport to return to air when UFC 249 takes place at Jacksonville, Florida’s headlined by Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje fighting for the interim lightweight title.

No fans will be allowed, but the UFC is putting on three shows in eight days to get rolling again.

Such is the desire for live sport even the pacifists might tune in. Or perhaps not.

ESPN is showing live games from North Korea’s baseball league, one of the few live events being played.

In this way the NRL has lost its opportunity to be the first major sport around the world to resume its competition, a small boast, but it shows the appetite for live sport and the advantage the game by returning in less than three weeks.

Some who have argued against the resumption of the NRL point out that all the biosecurity checks in the world are useless once the players begin tackling each other and sweaty bodies begin rubbing up against sweaty bodies.

The UFC has received similar criticism.

But two non-infected wrestlers could wrestle until they grew a third arm and not infect each other.

Originally published as NRL 2020: Anti-vaxxer saga highlights NRL’s stupidity, Paul Kent