Lionel Messi Is Making Rare Political Statements On Instagram This Weekend

Lionel Messi’s Instagram account recently reached 200 million followers. The account mostly just tweets out ads for the biggest brands in the world, such as adidas, Pepsi, Gatorade and SpaceScooter. The Argentine occasionally posts about his family (and that water buffalo he calls a dog) or to give a heartfelt goodbye to a beloved teammate.  What you almost never see Messi do is make any sort of statement that could be seen as remotely political, but that changed this weekend. On back-to-back days, Messi posted about vaccines and human rights. While neither issue is actually political, both have become politicized in recent years.  On Friday, Messi posted about the importance of getting vaccinated. The video post was a partnership with former Barcelona sponsor UNICEF and mostly targeting child vaccinations. The post doesn’t specifically mention the Covid-19 vaccine, but it’s clearly an attempt to allay fears of vaccines at a time when most of the world still needs to be vaccinated against Covid-19.  Sadly, vaccines have become political, especially in the U.S., where an outsized portion of Americans from a particularly political affiliation is refusing to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Of course, vaccine hesitancy has been going on for years and…
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