In October 2020, more than a month before the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would receive emergency-use authorization from the FDA, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association got to work.
The WNBPA understood that misinformation in regards to the virus and vaccine had been ramping up, and it seemed to be getting harder and harder to seek reliable guidance. They also likely considered that professional athletes represented a relatively easy target for misinformation and conspiracy theories as highly impressionable young people with a lot of free time on their hands – time often spent on their phones scrolling social media – and relatively little contact with the outside world. So they came together with league commissioner Cathy Engelbert and set out a plan to educate WNBA players about the Covid-19 vaccine so that they could make educated choices when the time came.
