The Southeastern Conference is now ‘partners’ with Pfizer

Prediction: Said partnership will one day be scrubbed from the sports league’s website.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey has always been a vaccine booster

UPDATE: Late Friday afternoon, four days after first asking, I received a reply from Herb Vincent, associate commissioner of the Southeastern Conference. Mr. Vincent confirmed that “Pfizer is a sponsor of the SEC.” None of my other questions were answered. Here is the full statement:

“Your questions would require us to obtain private information of individuals that we do not routinely collect, require responses that fall outside the SEC’s expertise, or would be otherwise inappropriate for us to answer. Instead, we are providing the following statement:

“Pfizer is a sponsor of the SEC. The message to which you refer reflects the guidance of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and presumes that, as with any vaccine or other medication, individuals will seek the guidance of an appropriate professional before taking action.  For clarification, the Southeastern Conference does not mandate and has never mandated its employees or student-athletes to take the COVID vaccine.”

***

We can add Pfizer to the list of 10 corporations that are now official sponsors of the immensely popular Southeastern Conference sports league.

To me, this strongly suggests the 14 colleges that make up this league endorse the narrative that everyone should get Pfizer’s vaccines and boosters.

Such an endorsement might strike most as uncontroversial if the shots had been proven to be effective at preventing infection and spread of the virus that causes Covid-19, but even Pfizer executives admit this is not the case.

In other words, it seems the 14 prestigious universities that comprise this athletic conference are willing to risk their current and future credibility (and potential future liability) to heavily promote a “vaccine” that doesn’t stop infection or spread and very possibly has caused millions of serious health conditions, including an unknown but perhaps large number of fatalities.

If you watch the SEC Network or have watched any SEC football games, you’ve seen this commercial “Saturdays are in the Details.” numerous times.

Would Coach Bryant support the jabs?

The commercial features a montage of exciting plays from previous SEC football games and depicts the pageantry that surrounds SEC football. Iconic SEC coach Paul “Bear” Bryant is even included (The Bear would have supported the shot?).

It’s not until the commercial’s final seconds that the narrator reveals the reason for this very expensive advertisement: “Pfizer and the SEC are teaming up to remind fans to get an updated Covid Booster shot.”

The commercial ends with a screen shot showing the logos of Pfizer, BioNTech (Pfizer’s German vaccine partner) and the SEC’s logo.

I have no issue with a corporation purchasing commercials to advertise a legal product (although in my opinion this product should never have been declared legal). I do wonder if the SEC or the networks that cover its games would allow a commercial to air that told viewers to run from these vaccines.

What caught my attention was the fact the SEC is featured prominently in this particular commercial (as in, “Prizer and the SEC are teaming up”) … and the SEC allowed its logo to be included in this spot.

As I was finishing this story today, a media spokesperson for Pfizer did confirm the company is now a corporate sponsor of the SEC. (The spokesperson had originally responded to my questions with an email stating, “we don’t comment on our campaigns.”)

Four days after I asked, a spokesperson for the SEC did confirm this partnership. I did find this link that lists 10 SEC corporate sponsors, and Pfizer’s logo is not included (UPDATE: I see it’s now been added), which seems odd as this corporate sponsorship must have been inked several weeks ago.

See Reader Comments for list of Unanswered Questions ….

I’ve included my emailed questions to the SEC office in the Reader Comments section. Readers may find the fact none of these questions were answered as revealing as I did.

My personal view is the SEC - which is made up of 14 colleges, 13 of which are public universities that receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-payer funding - should answer such questions.

My questions also deal with a controversial “vaccine,” a vaccine every one of these universities have either mandated for students and faculty or strongly recommended, with those who do not comply suffering various forms of disparate and (in my view) discriminatory treatment.

It strikes me as interesting that even after so many of the early claims made by supporters of mandatory vaccines have proven to be false, these 14 colleges are still encouraging their students, faculty and the millions of fans of these schools’ athletic teams to get a booster produced by Pfizer.

How much money is Pfizer paying the SEC?

Furthermore, the league and its members are now profiting from a corporate sponsorship that must be worth millions of dollars.

How much Pfizer might have paid to become a “corporate sponsor” is another question Pfizer or the SEC wouldn’t answer (nor would ESPN/Disney, the primary owner of The SEC Network).

According to one story I found, such sponsorship “deals … are believed to be worth low-to-mid seven figures annually.”

The above story was written in early 2019. If the reporter was accurate in his estimates, a sponsorship deal with the SEC costs at least two to seven million dollars annually, a price tag that has probably gone up in the last 3 1/2 years.

As partnerships go, this one is lower key ….

Typically when the league signs up a new sponsor both the conference and the company are eager to announce said “partnerships.” I quickly found numerous articles where current and previous SEC corporate sponsors seek to publicize these partnerships (for example, here, here, here and here) … which has yet to happen with the Pfizer partnership “announcement.”

An important marketing investment …

From The Knoxville News, I copied two sentences from a story announcing Pilot’s (now abandoned) partnership deal with the SEC: “The SEC had 16 official sponsors before the SEC Network began; now the network has eight … All are deeply involved in the conference.”

One has little difficulty understanding why so many companies might want to be “deeply involved” with the SEC. Indeed, it’s difficult to identify a pastime of Southerners that engenders the passion of college football. (At one point, the recent Alabama-Tennessee game had more than 17 million viewers, far more viewers than the World Series now attracts).

That is, one can see why Pfizer might want the kingpins of the SEC to sign off on and endorse their vaccines and boosters.

My theory has long been that the vaccine supporters and the vaccine producers made a strategic decision to intentionally recruit as many influential “stakeholders” to advance the narrative that everyone should get vaccinated. For example, if prestigious doctors’ groups endorsed the vaccine, it would be far less likely large numbers of Americans might be “vaccine hesitant.”

Similarly, if every college in the SEC (with all their science and medicine professors and myriad credentialed “experts”) becomes “vaccine stakeholders,” the authorized vaccine narrative will become even more iron-clad. More specifically, it would seem to be very unlikely that 14 colleges that have actually signed off on a corporate sponsorship with the main vaccine-producing company would later lead any effort to discredit said vaccines and boosters.

Another ‘logic’ puzzler….

The SEC’s partnership with Pfizer is perplexing for another reason. The SEC is a sports league and, as we read thousands of times 26 months ago (when it seemed that all sports may be cancelled), the “first priority” of the league’s leaders was and remains the “health and safety” of the league’s student athletes.

However, as quickly became known (and should have been known two months after the Wuhan outbreak), the “health and safety” of young, healthy student-athletes was not placed in peril by this disease, nor advanced by the “vaccines” or now the vaccine boosters.

We all now know there was never any scientific evidence that the vaccines reduced infection or spread. This outcome wasn’t even studied in the clinical trials. This means the only remaining justification for the shots was that they (allegedly) reduce “severe” cases or the probability of death. This is still the only half-way plausible justification for people getting the next round of shots.

However, at least 31 months of data now prove that student athletes face virtually no risk of developing a severe case of this disease. I’ve yet to find one article citing an SEC athlete who was hospitalized in severe condition from COVID and there have certainly been no reports of an SEC athlete who died from Covid. This would be real-world “case studies” spanning years and involving many thousands of student athletes.

In other words, the leaders of the SEC and its member institutions of “higher learning” mandated or strongly pushed a vaccine to keep student-athletes from experiencing an outcome that has yet to be recorded.

They traded a health risk of zero for whatever risk there may be to young adults who get the shots (and this risk is certainly not zero.) Different studies produce different numbers, but the myocarditis risk for vaccinated young males could be as as low (or as high) as 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 3,000.

If the SEC is encouraging “everyone” to get these boosters, the conference must also be encouraging its student athletes to get this latest shot. Another question I asked that’s yet to be answered: “Is the SEC encouraging student athletes to get these shots? If not, why not?”

Playing with fire?

Whether they know it or not, the SEC and its member institutions are probably playing with future-liability fire by continuing to endorse and promote these vaccines. If it’s ever conclusively proven these shots are not safe, but are dangerous - and officials at these colleges had reason to know this was the case … and still continued to push these shots several years into the pandemic, the lawsuits that might emerge could evaporate whatever corpus sits in the endowment funds of these universities.

One also wonders if prospective science or medical (or business or humanities) students in the future will be willing to incur massive debt to let such “experts” and scholars provide their “education.”

Of course, any research that might conclude the vaccines were a scam would probably have to come from any university that may still be performing real “science” (not to be confused with “NIAID-funded science.”)  Is it possible the real goal of Pfizer’s “investment” in these colleges and sports leagues is to prevent such studies from being conducted?

I don’t know (although I’d be willing to guess). What I do know is that the colleges of the SEC apparently have no reservations about “teaming up with Pfizer” to encourage everyone to get Pfizer’s booster shots. “Blood money” or not, the colleges of the SEC apparently have no qualms about cashing Pfizer’s giant checks.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if one day webmasters at America’s most popular athletic conference quietly scrub any mention that this particular company was ever a corporate partner with the SEC.

***