Don’t look now, but the Nets may yet be finishing the season with All-Star Kyrie Irving finally able to play in home games. As first reported by Politico and picked up by other major news organizations, New York mayor Eric Adams is set to provide athletes with exemptions to the private sector mandate barring unvaccinated employees from reporting for work in the city. Considering that the said protocol provides no other restrictions, the di-chotomy becomes apparent in sporting events; unjabbed players of host teams cannot suit up, but are allowed to be in the venue, anyway, along with spectators and visitors whose vaccination status does not need to be checked.
Significantly, Irving himself underscored the absurdity of the situation by sitting courtside in back-to-back matches at the Barclays Center, including one in which the Nets took on the Knicks, two weeks ago. To add injury to insult, the National Basketball Association then fined the franchise for affording him access to the locker room after the contest. As an aside, rumors have him also participating in practices on the sly, in contravention of the mandate held over from the previous dispensation.
In any case, Adams’ decision provides a compromise to the need for businesses, and vaccinated employees in those businesses, to feel safe, and to the reality that shades of gray envelop the implementation of COVID-19-related health measures. The interplay between collective safety and individual civil liberties is no more apparent than among government officials charged with ensuring both.
The easy answer would be for Irving and other sports personalities to get inoculated, a not inconsiderate development given the proven science behind the action. Unfortunately, these count with the holdouts who believe in — and, worse, help spread — the misinformation, which effectively gets perpetuated because of their status as public figures. From this vantage point, the problem, therefore, lies not in Adams, but in those who refuse the injection.
Interestingly, the exemption figures to be subject to monitoring, and because it’s slated to be in effect by administrative fiat, it can likewise be withdrawn the same way. The number of cases keeps fluctuating, in part precisely because of the elusiveness of total immunity. And, for that, the finger needs to be pointed at Irving and his ilk.
ANTHONY L. CUAYCONG has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994. He is a consultant on strategic planning, operations and Human Resources management, corporate communications, and business development.