Aaron Rodgers used a homeopathy COVID vaccine and ended up with COVID. What went wrong, why did it not work?
Spoiler alert: If you see the word “homeopathy”, then what you are actually seeing is a big bold flashing red neon sign that announces to the world “Here be Bullshit”.
What happened to Aaron?
If you are into football then you probably know that Aaron Rodgers is the quarterback for the Green bay Packers.
Back last August he was asked during a news conference if he was vaccinated. He confirmed and said “Yeah, I’m immunized”. What he had actually done was to take a homeopathy vaccine and not an actual vaccine at all. Inevitably he got COVID and then needed to explain himself.
It has cost him in many ways; not only is he is on the bench, but the NFL fined the Packers $300,000 for letting this happen, and also personally fined him $14,650. One of his major sponsors, Wisconsin-based Prevea Health, said it had ended its nine-year partnership with the veteran quarterback.
Ouch!
Jon Stewart perhaps best summed it up with this quip, “How the f*** does a quarterback not understand the concept of protection? Prevention and protection!”.
But a Homeopathic Vaccine just might work … right?
It’s a tested herbal remedy and should work, so did he take the wrong dose?
Er … no, that is not what is going on.
Permit me to lay out what Homeopathy actually is and give you an insight into it.
The supposed principle, dreamed up by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796, is that like cures like.
Let’s work an illustration of this. If you have trouble sleeping, then your Homeopathy remedy will probably have been made using caffeine, a substance that causes you to stay awake. This remedy is an extremely diluted version of the substance that supposedly caused the complaint, hence if “like cures like” it will supposedly fix you. This however is dilution on a mind-blowing logarithmic scale. A typical remedy can be as “potent” as 30C or might even be 100C.
What does that mean?
To make a remedy you start with 1 part of the raw ingredient, and you add to it 100 parts of water. You then vigorously mix with 10 hard strikes against an elastic body. This is called “succussion”. This is 1C. Now take 1 part of that 1C and add 100 parts of water, do the same and you have 2C. Keep repeating until you get to 30C. The claim is that a solution that is more dilute is described as having a higher potency. These excessively diluted substances are considered by homeopaths to be stronger and deeper-acting remedies.
To help you wrap your head around this, a 12C solution is equivalent to a pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic Oceans. 13C is the equivalent of just one single drop of that diluted in all the water on the planet.
In other words, by the time you get to 30C, your remedy contains literally no atoms from your original ingredient. What is truly bizarre is that this remedy is supposed to be magically infused with the property of the ingredient that you started with and to have somehow “forgotten” all about anything and everything else that ever came into contact with it. (Hint: the reason that plumbers are well paid is that it is not all water).
If your reaction is to think, “that’s absurd”, then you now truly do understand what Homeopathy actually is.
Yes it sounds crazy, but it works … right?
What causes confusion is that there exists a vast ocean of apparently conflicting studies. Some claim that Homeopathy works and some verify that it does not.
Is Homeopathy Schrodinger’s medicine, in the sense that it simultaneously both works and also does not work?
Not at all, what you have in play are many seriously flawed studies that failed to follow proper scientific controls and so some have ended up fooling themselves into believing that it works.
How can we establish the truth here, do we need to review each and every study in turn?
Not at all, there are reputable non-commercial organisations stuff full of subject matter experts from floor to ceiling that do all that heavy lifting for you …
- The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council researched it all extensively and concluded – There is no reliable evidence that homeopathy works
- UK’s National Health Service – homeopathic remedies perform no better than placebos
- The European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC) published its official analysis in 2017 finding a lack of evidence that homeopathic products are effective
- The American Medical Association – published evidence that it does work … nah, just kidding, they also conform that it does not work.
In this category the gold medal here just has to go to the British Medical Association. They did not simply declare that it does not work, but actually labelled it “witchcraft”. Dr Tom Dolphin, who made that statement, later retracted it as follows …
Tom Dolphin, a member of the BMA’s junior doctors’ committee, backed the motion. He said he had previously described homeopathy as witchcraft, but now wanted to apologise to witches for making that link.
“Homeopathy is not witchcraft, it is nonsense on stilts. It is pernicious nonsense that feeds into a rising wave of irrationality which threatens to overwhelm the hard-won gains of the enlightenment and the scientific method,” he said.
“We risk, as a society, slipping back into a state of magical thinking when made-up science passes for rational discourse and wishing for something to be true passes for proof.
“Let’s stop wasting scarce NHS money on something with plenty of evidence to show it does not work.
“Strike a blow for science and protect our patients from this insidious practice.”
Does it really not work?
Yes indeed, it really really does not, it is just a placebo.
To illustrate just how crazy it all is, critics of Homeopathy have resorted to the very dramatic act of public overdoses using Homeopathy. None of them ever needed to be rushed to the emergency room. That’s because these remedies contain literally nothing. That is of course the point they were making.
- New Scientist: Mass drug overdose – none dead
As for the ability of Homeopathy to protect you against COVID, just ask Aaron Rodgers. Sitting on the bench in quarantine means that he now has lots of time on his hands.
Further Reading
I was writing not too long ago about some of the utterly bizarre ingredient using in Homeopathy remedies such as earth worms, X-rays, urine, Semen, etc…
Those that truly believe and actually consume this stuff should be grateful that it is ultra diluted.
Thanks for the explanation of “homoeopathy”. I’d always assumed it was some kind of harmless snake oil – maybe like herbal teas given by a shaman.
I don’t follow football, so when this story broke I made some searches for “Aaron Rogers” while also using a number of unkind words. The Covid story wasn’t always the one which turned up. This tells me the guy is a spoiled rich punk who has been getting away with all kinds of intellectual laziness since his football skills became apparent. Probably from sometime in high school.