It’s a little hard to be a Kyrie Irving fan right now.

Being from Boston, and also being a teenager uninterested in professional sports, I was stoked when I heard the news that Irving would be joining the Celtics in 2017. He was a big name player that even younger me recognized. But to be honest, I didn’t really keep up with him or the rest of the Celtics back then. Maybe that was ultimately for the best since Irving is now going viral for refusing to get a vaccine.

The Irving scandal can be traced back to when the NBA held its annual summer meeting in August in order to discuss its agenda. The league office wanted to push through a mandate that 100% of its players were to get vaccinated against COVID-19. The conference followed the weirdest of back-to-back seasons, spanning from international shutdowns to cardboard cutout fans and near-obsessive nasal swabbing.

Unvaccinated players weren’t so keen on the plan for a vaccine requirement. They lobbied for testing, masking up as necessary; anything but actually getting the vaccine. The mandate was tabled and players’ vaccination status was ultimately left to their own discretion.

However, everything changed when New York and San Francisco required pro athletes to show proof of at least one vaccine dosage against COVID-19 in order to be allowed to compete indoors. Exceptions could be made for religious or medical reasons, but otherwise players that initially considered themselves to be off the hook would now be required to get vaccinated.

Irving was one such player. Officials hoped that the decision would force his hand, but he has still refused to get a vaccine. After New York’s mandate, the Nets made the decision on Oct. 12 to ban Irving from being with the team until he complies and receives at least one shot. This means no practice and no games.

From certain angles, I can understand vaccine hesitancy. BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) communities are more likely to reject a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine because of an (understandable) lack of trust in healthcare due to fewer positive experiences with healthcare staff and a pattern of nurses and doctors minimizing the experiences of BAME patients. Initially, vaccines only had emergency FDA approval. While they had undergone extensive testing prior to being available to the public, that label can be off-putting. But now, the Pfizer vaccine is fully approved under the FDA. Beyond causing higher rates of cases and unnecessary deaths, vaccine hesitancy is allowing new strains of COVID-19 to arise, prolonging the pandemic.

Hearing this resistance from Irving of all people makes me, for lack of a better word, hesitate. He stated in an interview that he thinks the Earth is flat. He later backtracked on that quote before essentially retracting it, saying that people should do their own research and that he doesn’t know the answer. He eventually apologized for his remarks, but he’s still known to engage with conspiracy theories: one recent social media post that he interacted with claimed that “secret societies are administering vaccines in a plot to connect Black people to a master computer for a plan of Satan.”

Irving expressed that he feels for those who have lost their livelihoods because they refused to comply with a vaccine mandate. On social media, I frequently see nurses lamenting that they’ve lost their income as a result of the new laws. I struggle to garner sympathy for these professionals who are directly responsible for so many people’s well-being. And although receiving the vaccine may feel unnecessary to those who don’t work in healthcare, it really, really isn’t. What about all the time you spend in an enclosed, indoor area breathing each others’ air? And what about outside of your work, like when you go to the grocery store and shop alongside the elderly and the young and the immunocompromised?

There’s another angle to the Irving drama, though, and it’s beyond frustrating. Many people have taken to Twitter to express their concerns and opinions about Kyrie Irving’s decision to remain unvaccinated and his opinions on the vaccine mandate in general. Some have drawn comparisons between Irving’s situation and Magic Johnson.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, who is known for promoting dangerous conspiracy theories and was temporarily suspended from Twitter after posting false information about COVID-19 vaccines, tweeted such a statement.

“The fascist NBA won’t let Kyrie Irving play for refusing a vaccine. Yet they still let Magic Johnson play with HIV,” Greene wrote.

Magic Johnson, who was a member of the Los Angeles Lakers for 13 seasons and won the NBA championship five times, retired in 1991 after announcing that he had been diagnosed with HIV. He returned to play until protests from fellow players forced him to retire again.

HIV is a disease that can be contracted through blood and sexual contact. COVID-19 is a respiratory virus spread through droplets expelled through the mouth and nose. Which one sounds more likely to be caught during a sport that requires extended periods of being face-to-face? You tell me.

It’s so frustrating to see my social media flooded with these sorts of posts. It feels as though we’re going back in time and undoing all of the important social progress we’ve made. Anti-vaccine as a concept used to be a fringe ideology, but now it’s taking the mainstream. It hurts even more that well-respected, prominent athletes are publicizing these opinions.

It’s just plain silly. Why is Irving refusing to play when he has such a successful career? He could be a core player of the Nets. Instead, he’s taking a backseat and letting Kevin Durant and James Harden steal the show.

I can respect a personal decision, but when your personal decision endangers the public, either directly or by spreading misinformation, it’s not a personal decision anymore.

Cameron Bonnevie can be reached at cbonnevie@wesleyan.edu.