Anti-Vaxxer Olympians Fought for the Vaccine Mandate. Did the Mandate triumph?

On the morning of Sept. 27, 2021, Josh Hargis opened a private video-chat link for what the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee billed as an open dialogue about its newly implemented mandate. All members of Team USA would Not required to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by Nov. 1, unless they could obtain a medical exemption — or a religious one. The executive order to jump the scientific starting gun on the 2022 Winter Games was a harrowing decision, senior Olympic officials acknowledge, not least because they knew the anti-vaxxer crowd — emboldened by an emerging class of brazenly unvaccinated superstar athletes — would come at them with fake news.

“From the start of the pandemic, we have made science-based, data-driven decisions,” the USOPC’s CEO wrote in a memo to all American athletes, which was attached to an invitation for the meeting and obtained by Rolling Stone. “There is strong support for this requirement from our community.”

Four people on the call reported that there were two-dozen athletes who signed up for the call. A half-dozen of them were vaccine skeptics. One athlete who had a first-responder job said that the jab was not suitable for her. When a would-be Olympian brought up a case study from Europe, the USOPC’s medical chief gently brushed it away And reiterated that the American Centers for Disease Control guidelines are the law of the land andThe ice. Hargis regarded the Olympic doctors to be “just throwing up their hands” “disregarding”The alleged evidence that was presented by the fledgling resistance. He sensed something deeper than Fauci-flavoured boilerplate at the other end. The American hero felt betrayed and abandoned by Team USA.

Josh Hargis may be remembered as the former Corporal Joshua Hargis (Third Battalion, 75th Army Ranger Regiment), who was retired. He was killed in a suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan on Oct. 6, 2013. After surgery, he emerged in conscious and unconscious, wrapped in a blanket with enough large stripes to resemble the flag. His legs were gone. His commanding officer hung a Purple Heart from a feeding tube, and Hargis, against doctors’ orders, still managed to raise a customary hand toward his forehead. The so-called “Purple Heart” was hung from a feeding tube by his commanding officer. Hargis, against doctors’ orders, still managed to raise a customary hand toward his forehead. “salute seen around the world”The viral video went viral.

Hargis was a two time world champion in sled hockey for Team USA over the past three-and a half years. He is now a part of a team with other disabled veterans who are chasing gold on their skateboard-shaped sleighs. Modern-day Hargis “miracle on ice,”NBC called his trip. The 2022 Paralympics was within sight. With a strong season, this medal was the best after the Purple Heart. Then the pandemic hit, and the 32-year-old Hargis, citing a lack of data on long-term health effects and his wife’s auto-immune disorder, invoked his freedom to refuse vaccination.

The contentious call last September was sandwiched in the same week between Team USA’s countdown to inoculation and an overruling pseudo-mandate from the International Olympic Committee — get vaxxed, or spend three weeks in quarantine once you get to China. Hargis, shook, prepared to file a religious exemption to meet the American deadline, then make the final roster and defend USA Hockey’s gold. But he claims that coaching staffers pressured him and several teammates to agree right away, more than a month before Team USA’s deadline, to get jabbed and get on with training. Hargis recalls that he was told the following Friday, after the executive order was signed. “We need to know by Monday: You’re either going to get vaccinated, or you’re going to opt out.”(USA Hockey declined to comment.

“I was absolutely fucking pissed,”Hargis speaks in an exclusive interview Rolling Stone. “I was told it was for performance-based reasons, but I think that everything goes into it — this last year of the majority being vaccinated, peoples’ individual feelings toward the vaccine — and it boils down to the vaccine mandate is why I got cut.”

The war hero has lost his place. However, his battle-hardened beliefs were not forgotten: Hargis fought on, but it isn’t reported that he has.To form a coalition from the unvaccinated, unscientific and sometimes straight-up unhinged. Stitch together Team USA’s denial of the vaccine-denying soldier with a patchwork of Olympians — a Swiss snowboarder in isolation, a Dutch speed-skater co-opted by conspiracy theorists, a famously maskless American swimmer, another medal hopeful intimidated by her own future with the U.S. Army, among others — and you’ll notice a tapestry quietly hanging over the Winter Games, as torn and frayed as the world outside.

The non-superstar unvaxxed athlete class has had to contend with haters and career risks. Their numbers are decreasing: Rolling StoneSurvey of executives and athletes of 87 nations revealed that there was only one unvaccinated Olympic competitor. This is despite the fact that even vaccine skeptics in NFL, NBA, NHL and NFL look at booster shots and take one for their team. Hargis, along with his followers, suggest a rattle and hoof of what he calls “His religion”. “an overwhelming voice of athletes that are in opposition.”

Medical officials and Team USA’s own athlete advocates, meanwhile, insist that anti-vaxxer influence must succumb to the facts of the unrelenting pandemic. “Let’s not forget, this is not just about the individual athlete — this is about their fellow teammate, their coach, even their competitor,” Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, the chief medical officer of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, tells RSWhile preparing a temporary Team USA testing facility in Los Angeles for the delegation, before they depart for China next week. “Vaccines give us our best shot to keep our entire community safe. Science has proven it. The CDC has confirmed it. And I stand by it.”

Michael Andrew is the OG A list of vaccine-denying athletes. Before the Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving began to boycott New York City’s vaccine mandate in October, Andrew admittedHe was one of approximately 100 unvaccinated members of Team USA at last summer’s delayed Tokyo Games. Before Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Packers quarterback was able to hide his vaccination status and thank Joe Rogan for his medical advice the champion swimmer was Find out more hereFox Business Network – Talking freedom in tank tops Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open before Michael Andrew was able to compete with him. ThatNBC interviews were difficult because he was wearing a mask, making it difficult to breathe underwater.

“You look at Novak Djokovic,” Andrew tells Rolling Stone. “And I look at Kyrie Irving and Aaron Rodgers and what they’re doing, and I’m encouraged by it and motivated. Being able to stand up, it has an effect.”

Andrew speaks by phone from Coronado in California, where the Republican mayor is RefuseTo enforce a mask mandate. (“Even on the label on the mask, it’s like, ‘This thing’s not gonna protect you from particles,’”Andrew claims. “If a mask really works as well as they said, I don’t think we’d be where we are right now.”) Wherever on Earth Michael Andrew is, it’s a place where he remains proudly unvaccinated. (“I was actually sick just this other week, and I didn’t get tested — took a Z-Pak and Ivermectin, and I’m feelin’ great!”) His world is a place where hand-sanitizer is enough prevention for a dude in reigning-gold-medalist shape who sees a return to normal like the next flip-turn right there at the end of the pool. (“If someone is immunocompromised and is at risk, then they shouldn’t go out,”Andrew declares. “We’re not responsible for other people’s health.”)

Andrew, who considers himself an accidental villain, and is concerned about the Paralympic, and Olympic, athletes who have denied the vaccine, is deeply worried. About how non-unionized amateurs could lose their careers as athletes — and as soldiers. About how his family says they received an email — “get vaccinated or else, in a very friendly way” — from USA Swimming last month, warning that mandates could force him out of international competition this year. (A spokesperson from USA Swimming claims that Andrew is not being investigated. “forced out.”) He has serious concerns about how religious exemptions might be ignored when they should be encouraged. You might also be interested in other unproven and more concerning theories.

“I don’t wanna be one of the rats in the lab,”Andrew “Fast-forward to now, and there’s some scary things happening in the sporting world.”

He’s referring to a VideoIt went viral last week. The context-free local-news supercut was first published by The HighWire, an anti-vax misinformation clearinghouse. Facebook has since banned it. SportsCenter Fake news. It suggestively warps through stories of more than 50 athletes collapsing on the field, heart-beating orchestral soundtrack and all — even though many of the incidents had NothingCovid is not to be confused with anything else.

One of the stories in the disinformation highlight reel Is that of Kjeld nuis, the reigning gold-medalist and world-record holder for 1,500-meter speed skating, became ill after he received his Pfizer vaccine in August. “It made me feel really fucked-up,”The Dutch star recalls the call with Rolling Stone The European Championships in Heerenveen.

Nuis was hospitalized after suffering from an inflamed Pericardium. PhotoInstagram: Next to him, one of them is a recovering man who is wearing a topless uniform at training camp. The heart condition — as with myocarditis, made notorious by conspiracy theorists — has been found to present extremely rare complications from the Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines; credible health experts maintain that immunization’s benefits far outweigh such risks.

Nuis was confused when he saw the fake-news clip for the first time. “Those anti-vaxxers said, ‘You see?! It’s poison! In a healthy guy, and a champion, it made him sick! It made him almost die!’Well, that was pretty ridiculous. It did not make me almost die,”Nuis. “But if you really think it’s poison, of course you’re going to say, ‘You see? There’s another one!’ Let ’em think like that. Man, that’s how war starts.”

Nuis respects each person’s right to choose their vaccinations, even though he believes that people with healthy bodies should be vaccinated. These areTheir profession should listen to their doctors. He says he’d tell Djokovic that his body’s reaction to the vaccine had been a case of bad luck and timing. Djokovic is unrelenting in his determination. It is not allowedTo play in the French Open, or possibly even the U.S. Open, if he is not vaccinated. Nuis, fully boosted is the odds on favorite to win gold again on the speed-skating track. “I want to be at the Olympics so bad, that even if I didn’t want to take the vaccine,”He said, “I’d take it anyway.”

If Josh Hargis was the Novak Djokovic of Team USA — denied entry into a foreign land despite his best efforts of paperwork and principle — then Patrizia Kummer is almost like the Kyrie Irving of the Winter Games right now: She is sitting around, jabless, waiting to compete on the road.

While the Swiss snowboarder may not have won gold, she did spend last night at a Holiday Inn Express Beijing. And she’s still got 11 nights of solitary confinement ahead of her. Kummer believes she is the only 2022 Olympic athlete to have signed up for 21-days in hotel quarantine, instead of getting a life-saving vaccine.

Kummer gets up at 6 a.m. and meditates. She then orders room service at 7.30 before embarking on an active training session. Kummer’s room has two yoga mats. She also has dumbbells, a bike and a balanceboard. She plays juggle. A biology textbook sits on a desk for online classes, when she’s not re-doing the website for her bed-and-breakfast back home, or overseeing the renovations on a 15th-century building from abroad. “I don’t miss the snow that much,”She says. “And when I’m not feeling like working, Netflix is working, too.”

Kummer will be wearing a mask next month when she can go outside again. Hargis, however, does not see the three-week isolation that was imposed by the Chinese or the IOC as Kummer. “purely punitive.” The only successful vaccine-denier at the Olympics refuses to publicly discuss her rationale — “I’m not doing the vaccine, because why should I?” — and when Rolling Stone asked on Thursday if her personal decision on a global stage might be co-opted as a symbol of resistance in a public-health crisis, Kummer said she’d come to Beijing for the medal stand, not a soapbox.

“I never saw me as, like, a freedom-fighter or anything,” Kummer maintains. “For me, personally, it’s really important that nobody is telling anybody else what they have to do with their bodies…. I think it’s really dangerous.”

Kummer challenged Claudia Riegler, an Austrian snowboarder, to a 45-minute workout via YouTube. “I would have loved to do quarantine with her next door,”Kummer spoke out about her friend who refused vaccination this week through qualifiers. Team Austria is mandated to administer vaccines, so Team Austria would. Appear that Riegler’s country will give up her Olympic roster slot entirely.

The Swedes feel protected, but the one quarantiner is not. She believes sports should not be politicized. She is enjoying the freedom that comes with a monastic life. “I’m a minimalist,” Kummer says. “I just want to relax and enjoy it here, because other people are spending, like, a lot of money to go to China to go to a temple and say no words for like 21 days. So I can be here and have that experience.”

Perhaps there won’t be any comparable crusader to Djokovic at next month’s Olympics, nor anti-maskers permitted inside China’s super-bubble known as “the closed loop.”However, in the middle the Winter Games, there is a pause. CDC-denying Rodgers could win the NFL MVP on Super Bowl weekend, re-normalized after losing the appeal for a medical exemption he’d filed with a 500-page makeshift textbook of his own research. Irving, who convinced his team to allow him to play 22 away games for $19million, We suggestThis week, he might be again “a beacon of hope and light”For “people getting fired for being unvaccinated.”

But there are other options. Will be an athlete in Beijing like Megan Henry, the American skeleton racer who’s expected to compete for gold. Doctors will be able to practice medicine in 2014. DiscoveredShe discovered that her lungs were clogged by a birth control product. Henry admits that she was initially nervous about the vaccine’s rare risk of recurrence. Last year, when Covid vaccines were first introduced. “If people have pre-existing conditions, I do think that they should not be forced to do something like that,”She says Rolling Stone.

Henry, except for his current role as a military intelligence officers with the U.S. Army. More than 2,700 soldiers were disciplinedBecause he refused to comply with the vaccine mandate passed by Congress last week. He was expected begin honorably discharging them next winter. Henry thinks amateur athletes — especially those who would choose to deny a vaccine — will always struggle to take on the system. “Realistically, I wouldn’t be able to be competing for the Olympic Games if I decided to do that,”She says. “I would also lose my job.”

Henry was able to get her first shot last March. When a teammate tested positive in a qualifying event held in Germany, Henry found the U.S. Olympic mandate to have been a relief. Her hotel roommate was also positive.

Tryouts were held by the U.S. Sled National Team in July, although Josh Hargis felt like coaches were putting off final roster decisions for Beijing until it became clear whether he — and what he recalls as three other unvaccinated players in the pool of potential Paralympians — would be able to compete. The Chinese were already stepping up. The International Olympic Committee appeared to open the door for countries to decide on their own vaccine policies.

“We were kinda struggling with being treated equally with the other players on the team that were vaccinated,”Hargis said. “Nothing was written down or nothing was said explicitly, but you could feel the pressure from the team, from the other players, from the coaching staff that we, as the unvaccinated players, were just creating an issue that didn’t need to be an issue. It was the ‘Why don’t you guys just go and do it?’ kind of thing. ‘Do it for the team.’”(None of the seven other players on sled hockey roster were contacted for this story. Rolling StoneUSA Hockey refused to make the team’s coach or general manager available for interviews.)

After the USOPC’s global lead on September 22, by RequirementsHargis states that full vaccination is possible or an approved exemption can be obtained within five-and a half weeks. “we started getting some real pressure from the staff.”Two other players chose to get the jab at once, he recalls. This put him and his unvaccinated colleague at risk of being infected.

The IOC presented its first Covid PlaybookHargis discovered Beijing one week later. “deceptive”What if you were to just take it all and put it in quarantine? Or could you skip over the Holiday Inn and keep training under the guise of a doctor’s note? With the geopolitical recriminations, was religious absolution possible? In China? However, he believed that his coaches wanted him to. “either get it or you’re done,”Over the course of a weekend, it had been possible to give Hargis, an exempt Christian, extra time to complete his exemption application. He was not going to open any more links.

Hargis claimed to have maintained extensive correspondence with USA Hockey officials and USOPC officials during last fall. Rolling StoneHargis failed to respond to many requests for clarification or further information. He did however admit in interview that he had been involved in instigating a “heated and emotional” conversation with his coach at a training camp in late October, concerning both the team’s season on the ice and the internal divide that Hargis perceived over the mandate. He refused to budge after the paperwork was dragged out. On Nov. 4, RSIndependent confirmation has confirmed that the roster of sled hockey players dropped two players. Hargis was told that his performance was not quite gold enough; he wouldn’t be receiving an invitation to his first Paralympics.

“Every sacrifice, the hard work,”Hargis said, “all of that was to get to that Paralympic dream, and after earning that… it’s just taken away because I was unwilling to potentially risk my personal health.”

The next morning, Hargis says, he received an email informing him — a day late and a Beijing financial bonus short — that his religious exemption had been approved.

An American Olympic official tells the truth Rolling Stone that not a single medical or religious exemption has been filed for an American athlete trying to compete unvaccinated in the 2022 Olympic Games beginning on Feb. 4; numbers for March’s Paralympics are unavailable, the official says. The IOC refused to confirm that any competitors were unvaccinated, citing a complex web of international privacy laws. However, it noted that very few people are worthy of an independent review for medical exemption. Hargis claims that another player on the U.S. Sled National Team was unvaccinated, but couldn’t be reached by. RS, opted to leave Beijing before the roster was completed on Nov. 29.

Undeterred, Hargis DM’d his fellow vaccine deniers from the Zoom call — and Michael Andrew was one of the first to respond. Both had deep faith and believed that religious exemptions could be more commonly accepted in the stateside competition for Paralympic and Olympic sports. Andrew believes otherwise. “you start to then infringe upon certain amendments that are put forward for us as Americans.”

They worked with Hargis’s wife to draft a form letter, making their case in opposition to a vaccine mandate: The American talent pool would inherently diminish, they believed, and perceptions of the Team USA value system could be denigrated. Andrew and Hargis requested that all kinds of Paralympians and Olympians copy, paste, sign, and send it to the USOPC Athletes’ Advisory Council, an internal advocacy group.Hargas thought his resistance could be a battalion of the no-vax voiceless. However, their group ended up being more like a 10 man patrol unit. “I don’t think we really got a large number of athletes involved, and it was something that over time just had dwindled,”Andrew acknowledges. “It sucks that we didn’t get a whole lotta traction with that — I’m not gonna create any change on my own.”

Hargis has been inspired by Irving’s NBA protest of a law requiring entertainers to be vaccinated in New York. “But the biggest difference between an athlete like that and someone like me,”He said, “is money. Look at how much money he brings to his organization and how much that organization has the potential to lose. And then also he has his teammates on his side to advocate for him, and from my experience, we didn’t have that.”

Rashad Evans is a mixed-martial art superstar who believes that vaccines are possible “dangerous,”Hargis gave him a DM, which encouraged him to continue fighting. “You may not be able to make the financial gains, but at least you have your life,”Evans recalls the interview with Rolling StoneThese falsehoods are scientifically based.

Evans said that he communicates regularly via Telegram with a number of amateur and professional athletes who refuse or regret taking vaccinations. “I think there’s room for this kind of silent majority to be heard, because at the end of the day, this silent majority is a vast number of people,” Evans says, utilizing a termNixon and Trump invoked it. “There’s a lot of people who are staying silent on this topic because they’re just trying to go along with the get-along — it’s a huge majority, with a lot of athletes at a really high level.”

Hargis connected as a last-chance attempt Brad Snyder is a six-time Paralympic gold medalist He also stepped on an IED while in Afghanistan, and who, in his capacity as a board member of the USOPC’s advisory group, has counseled several members of Team USA voicing their vaccine hesitancy. Hargis claims that he was told his uprising hadn’t been stopped. “met a threshold of concern.”Snyder disagrees. “They’re not a silent minority,”He says it. RS. “Their perspective was heard, and their perspective was duly considered, and every time that there has been a meeting on this particular subject, there’s been an open forum on feedback.”

In his capacity as an activist athlete, Snyder equates the sporting world’s internecine shadow battle over vaccines as part of a broader conflict between revolution and evolution. For him and other athlete advocates inside the system, this is not a scandal like the mega-millionaires Irving and Djokovic holding out until they’re permitted to play so much as reality setting in, for the occasionally far-out.

“It’s much easier for Kyrie or Djokovic to do it,”He says. “In conversations that I’ve had with folks who are making a principled stand, I’ve conveyed that I respect a principled stand. What I disagreed with was the narrative that their dream was being taken away from them based on the mandate policy — when you’re faced with a choice of this mandate or these protocols, it’s kind of a lose-lose.”

“So, yeah, Josh Hargis is fighting an uphill battle because there aren’t a lot of folks who are either willing to make the principled stand or feel as strongly as he and the other athletes,” Snyder continues. “It’s easier to stand on the outside — to sort of lob complaints, to say the system’s broken — and burn the house down, than to fix it. That’s easier. What’s really harder is to get inside and figure it out.”