Claims baselessly link COVID vaccines to athlete deaths

CLAIM: Two researchers found that more than 1,500 athletes have suffered cardiac arrest since COVID-19 vaccinations began, compared to a previous average of 29 athletes per year, suggesting the vaccines are causing a dramatic rise in such cardiac issues.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The researchers cited a number from a blog that lists news stories about recent deaths and medical emergencies among people of all ages, from all over the world — some of which were attributed to other causes, such as cancer. The previous figure, meanwhile, is from a 2006 study that specifically reviewed literature for reports of sudden cardiac deaths among athletes under age 35. Comparing the two sources, with different methodologies, is not scientifically sound, experts told The Associated Press.

THE FACTS: Following Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest during a game Monday, social media posts and Fox News gave air to a long-circulating and faulty narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are causing a dramatic increase in athlete deaths.

“Cardiologist Peter McCullough and researcher Panagis Polykretis looked into this trend in Europe, European sports leagues. They found that prior to COVID and the COVID-19 vaccines there were roughly 29 cardiac arrests in those European sports leagues per year,” Fox’s Tucker Carlson claimed in a segment Tuesday night. “Since the vax campaign began, there have been more than 1,500 total cardiac arrests in those leagues and two-thirds of those were fatal.”

Carlson was in fact referencing a letter, not a rigorous study, that McCullough and Polykretis published in a Scandinavian journal in late 2022.

That letter does claim that “1598 athletes suffered cardiac arrest, 1101 of which with deadly outcome” between January 2021 and late 2022 — but it simply cites a blog, goodsciencing.com, for that figure.

Misleading because it uses the term athletes when not all are. https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

Up to 1621 with 1118 dead but it includes little league players up to retired people who simply worked in sports and a few non-sports people who doing a physical activity like running, dancing etc. Acanning through a few pages, it looks to be about 60-70% are actual athletes(pro or not) or ex-athletes and between 20-45 years old.

Here’s another version that IS mostly young athletes and has 304 listings. https://airtable.com/shrbaT4x8LG8EbvVG/tbl7xKsSUIOPAa7Mx

At any rate, it’s best these days to use your instincts and observation.

I’ve never noticed so many stories of famous people dropping like flies as I do now. I’ve heard about the super rare possibility of a child having cardiac issues but have never known it to be talked about like it’s normal as it’s talked about now. I’ve never seen so many news articles list off all the really odd sounding reasons that might give a person a heart attack. Sleep, rest, exercise, cold, heat are some recent ones.

I started out as someone who was a true believer that vaccinations were one of the most important reasons for increasing lifespans. Which up until the current crisis remained to be true. Now unfortunately, we are witnessing a spectacular failure of the public trust which I have said from the time it started to be recognized will result in an inevitable resurgence in fully preventable disease and death.

My wife is a retired career nurse and department head at long term care facilities. As a long time Hazmat officer, I have had far more vaccinations than the general public with no serious complications even from some which were found to be problematic and discontinued.

Facilities where my wife worked would during bad flu seasons lose sometimes 20 or 30 residents a month. The flu vaccine had an obvious positive impact on this death rate, so I spent countless hours over the years working as a volunteer bus driver in my time off to help people get their flu vaccines and other vaccines. My wife and I even volunteered and were paid for work we did at the Life Care Center in Kirkland the long-term care facility to be hit with multiple fatalities from Covid in the United States. I was one of the first persons on this forum to make comments based on firsthand experience on Covid.

My wife and I were not in a big hurry to bother with the Covid vaccines ourselves because we had been exposed and infected early on. Common sense and lifelong experience told us that natural immunity was likely better than the protection one would receive from experimental “vaccines”. Still, like most we assumed that the “vaccines” were likely beneficial to the population in general.

But then we started witnessing firsthand people among our family, friends and associates suffering from what were described initially as rare injuries from the vaccines. Just in my own family, my mother became in invalid almost immediately, my father suffered from multiple blockages in his heart which nearly killed him. My brother, who was a long-time airline captain, extremely healthy with no history of heart problems was grounded by myocarditis. My cousin’s son who was 13 at the time and very active in sports had a debilitating stroke while on the playing field. A close friend and neighbor whose wife is a hospital administrator who was extremely active was diagnosed with cancer throughout his body and died weeks after getting “vaccinated”... and it goes on and on. We would have to have been blind not to have noticed a connection.

But to make matters worse the regulators whose responsibility it was to keep the public safe from this type of thing turned a blind eye for mostly political reasons. And instead of addressing legitimate concerns coercive policies began popping up everywhere. Medical professionals who tried to speak out were blacklisted and some lost their licenses. Firefighters, nurses, and even doctors we know lost their jobs after they had been caring for those sick with Covid because they refused the vaccines after seeing horrible injuries and also the results of defective treatment protocols which were killing patients.

Up until witnessing all of this firsthand I would not have believed this was possible in this country. And to top it off there was an obvious political bias and our news media and big tech companies have basically enforced a blackout on any source of information that contradicts the official narrative.

It is not surprising at this point that we have large numbers of people who continue to go along with the official narrative despite a mountain of evidence that keeps growing. Should we be mad at them when our own opinions started out with similar points of view and mostly hard firsthand experience turned our heads and enabled us to see truths that are still mostly hidden from the public at large.

This is a mess and crime against humanity created largely by those whose responsibility it was to keep us all safe. The perpetrators are doubling down to keep from facing any consequences using politics and other forms of malevolent influence to protect them. And we still have legions of those willing to go along even here on Free Republic because they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the wool has been pulled over their eyes. It is very, very sad.

I appreciate your perspective and haven't recommend that anyone get vaccinated.

But you've also neatly summarized my issue when you said "...we have large numbers of people who continue to go along with the official narrative despite a mountain of evidence that keeps growing."

It's that mountain of evidence you reference that I haven't seen and no one here seems to be able to cite it.

I don't doubt that your anecdotes about people you know are real, although I doubt any but the myocarditis were deemed by doctors to be a result of the vaccine.

More to the point, we've given over 650M shots in the US. If they're causing the kinds of problems you describe we should be seeing huge increases in heart blockages, strokes, cancers, etc., etc.

But I don't see that in the statistics.

Why do you think that is?

But I don't see that in the statistics.

Why do you think that is?

It is because you are being intentionally and willfully ignorant. You would rather win an argument than face reality.

Life insurance death rates in people 18-64 went up 40% in the third and fourth quarter of 2021 after the vaccinations were forced on hundreds of millions. This increase in deaths was not attributed to Covid, but largely to unexplained increases in cancer, heart disease and other non-Covid explanations... This increased death rate did not subside in 2022 and has resulted in the largest drop in expected life spans ever seen in the USA. We are now back to expected life spans not seen in over 20 years.

But I would not expect you to be able to conclude anything from this type of data. Life is so much simpler when you just go along with the other sheeple isn't it?

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