Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety, passed out after this week’s Monday Night Football game just after making a regular defense play. Hamlin’s situation is critical; he appeared to have taken a blow to the chest just before going into cardiac arrest and losing consciousness. His sickness’ origin is still unknown.
The most frequent causes of sudden cardiac events in American athletes between 2014 and 2016 were discovered to be structural disorders of the heart muscle or arteries and irregular electric rhythms. Traumatic chest injuries have also been associated with such incidences, in a condition known as commotio cordis. With the awareness of these theories, online activists continued to link Hamlin’s health problems to vaccines.
Influencers who are anti-vaccine have been raising anxiety over a rumored increase in COVID shot-related athletic deaths for a time. These allegations have regularly been reviewed by fact-checkers, who have concluded that they are incorrect.
A physician who specializes in sports medicine and investigates tragic deaths in athletes, Jonathan Drezner, said in a statement to the media last year that he was “not aware of any COVID-19 vaccine-related sports and entertainment death.
“Thirteen medical deaths occurred during football-related activities in 2021 across players involved at all levels of competition, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, 8 of which were due to cardiac arrest. Two years previously, the same researchers had discovered 14 medical deaths, 10 of them were heart-related. These terrible incidents are still rare.
