(670 The Score) All but “a couple” Bulls players have received the initial dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, forward Thad Young said Thursday.
The Bulls released a statement to the Athletic on Wednesday confirming that most of their players received the vaccine, then Young discussed the topic more at length Thursday ahead of Chicago's game against Toronto in Tampa, Florida later in the evening. The Bulls were vaccinated Monday before taking off on a road trip, the Athletic reported. They’ll need to take a second dose in the coming weeks.
“This has been an ongoing process over the course of a couple months of discussing would it be available to us,” Young said. “Obviously, everyone else had to get it before us – essential workers, people who work in the hospitals, stuff like that. When it became available, a lot of the guys we just wanted the information. The Bulls and the league they came together and gave us a lot of the information that we needed to make the educated decisions. A lot of the guys decided they would take it.”
If 85% of a team’s players/staff are fully vaccinated, the NBA will loosen protocols for the organization, which would allow players to have guests on the road without testing and leave their hotel rooms at any time.
“When you become fully vaccinated, it kind of loosens up some of the protocols and some of the things we have as far as for our safety,” Young said. “A lot of the guys said, ‘You know what, let’s go on and get together and kind of take it.’ We have a lot of the information in our hands. And we’ve utilized the information and took the time to learn more about the vaccine. The guys who did take it came to the conclusion that we want to take it as soon as possible so we could loosen some of these protocols and try to get back to living a semi-normal life.”
The Bulls didn’t have any players sharing conspiracy theory-like opinions about the vaccine, Young said, though a few chose to not to it for undisclosed reasons.
“Nobody was like that,” Young said. “You had some guys that were just like, ‘No, I’m not taking it.’ And then you had the other guys who were like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take it.’ Nobody was like into conspiracy theories or anything like that. Everybody was just like a strong no or just like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to take it.’ I think we only had a couple guys who didn’t take it. And that was about it.”
Cody Westerlund is a sports editor for 670TheScore.com and covers the Bulls. Follow him on Twitter @CodyWesterlund.