Portland Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard said during Monday’s media day that when the team approached him about getting vaccinated to protect him against COVID-19 he immediately thought about his entire family.
“They presented the opportunity and I said, ‘Can I bring my family, too?’” Lillard said. “And they said, ‘yeah,’ and that was it.”
While most of the league’s players are vaccinated, according to reports, some have refused for personal reasons. Blazers guard CJ McCollum, president of the NBA Players Association, tweeted that 90% of the league is vaccinated. The Blazers announced that their entire roster and staff are vaccinated. Those players around the league who are not vaccinated could be in danger of not being allowed to play games in certain cities.
“I’m not mad at people for saying, ‘I need to do my research,’ or they got to take the steps that make them comfortable,” Lillard said. “But I have a lot of people in my family that I’m tight with and I spend a lot of time around and I’m just not going to put their health or their lives in danger because I want to do research. As a kid, I had to get shots my whole life. Before I went to college, I had to get shots. And, I couldn’t tell you one thing about any of them.”
Lillard said the deadly virus, which has killed more than 686,000 in the United States, has impacted his family.
“I’ve had people in my family actually die and people actually lose their lives to it, and there’s a way for me to protect myself and the people that I love, I’m going to do it,” Lillard said. “It’s pretty simple.”
McCollum said he is doing what he can to help educate himself and players in his new role.
“There’s a lot of questions, there’s a lot of concerns,” he said. “We’re entering another tough season. Obviously, you’ve got the Delta variant, you have a lot of cases that are spreading in certain areas and we’re trying to do our best to go on with the season. I think with introducing fans, again, people have families, obviously, my wife’s pregnant, so I’m in a position where I need to really know what’s going on at all times and take the proper precautions that are associated with having a productive season. And I think there’s a lot of players, families, coaches, who have immunocompromised people in the household. So, we’re paying close attention to everything and cautiously moving forward and trying to do our best to get through a season.”
-- Aaron Fentress | afentress@Oregonian.com | @AaronJFentress (Twitter), @AaronJFentress (Instagram), @AaronFentress (Facebook).
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