Anti-Vaxxers Exploit Damar Hamlin’s Crisis With Unfounded Covid-19 Vaccine Claims

With Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin in critical condition after suffering a cardiac arrest, guess what two radio personalities, Charlie Kirk and Dr. Drew, decided to do separately. Did they mention how the blow to the chest that Hamlin suffered during the Bills’ televised Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals could have led to the player’s cardiac arrest? Did they mention the different possible causes of cardiac arrest? Did they mention how unusual such a situation was, so unusual that the National Football League (NFL) ended up postponing the game as thousands of people watched stunned? Not exactly.

Kirk, who is the founder and President of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, that’s been supporting Donald Trump, tweeted, “This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.” And Dr. Drew, the media personality whose full name is Drew Pinsky, MD, posted the following on Twitter: “So disturbing. Another athlete who dropped suddenly.” All too familiar? Another athlete who dropped suddenly? What the heck were both of them talking about?

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Well, it seemed like a bunch of people on Twitter knew exactly what Kirk and Pinsky were talking about in their tweets. For example, look at the following trail of responses that Pinsky’s tweet elicited:

As you can see, Katrine Wallace, PhD, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, School of Public Health, told Pinksy, “It’s not too late to delete this tweet.” Comedian and author Jolenta Greenberg tweet-responded, “Stop insinuating such horrible misinformation.” Tyler Black, MD, an emergency psychiatrist, admonished, “You know exactly what you’re doing here, and it’s despicable.” And baseball writer Keith Law asked, “Are you really trying to exploit a tragedy like this?”

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Neither Kirk nor Pinsky explicitly mentioned Covid-19 vaccines in their tweets. Ah, but many on Twitter suspected that this pair was actually echoing the talking points that the film Died Suddenly has pushed. In fact, Stew Peters, the former bounty hunter turned radio host who was behind this film, tweeted the following: “Dozens of athletes in high school, college and minor leagues around the world have collapsed and #DiedSuddendly on the field of play. Now THIS, on national television with 10 million people watching. Don’t let them gaslight you. This is NOT normal.” Yep, he used the hashtag #DiedSuddenly, which was in all likelihood referring to his film. After all, it’s not every day that you see this hashtag used in a different context, unless it’s something like “Molten lava chocolate cake just appeared on my lap #DiedSuddenly.”

This Died Suddenly film wasn’t exactly chocolate cake. Instead, it was more like a chicken stew of film clips and sound bites taken out of context, mixed with various conspiracy theories, and seasoned with a lot of B.S. And in this case, B.S. didn’t stand for Bachelor’s of Science. These theories claimed that many people have, guess what, died suddenly after getting Covid-19 vaccines. However, such claims weren’t supported by, wait for it, wait for it, much scientific evidence at all, that I have detailed in my coverage for Forbes. When it came to facts, the film was like gigolo on a go-kart, playing fast and loose with them. For example, the film alluded to the fact that more deaths have occurred over the past two years than in previous years yet didn’t bother mentioning the possibility that a little thing called the Covid-19 pandemic could have been responsible for most of those excess deaths.

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Similarly, neither Peters nor the various Twitter accounts offered much scientific evidence behind suggestions that Covid-19 vaccination was to blame for Hamlin’s heart stopping on the gridiron. Unless Peters or others were invisible or really, really tiny, they weren’t on the field when the medical team was delivering chest compressions and defibrillation shocks to Hamlin. So how could they have known what actually happened to Hamlin.

Until information emerges from the medical doctors actually taking care of Hamlin at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, everyone else can only speculate what happened to the 24-year old Bills player. Hamlin who drafted out of the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 could have had some kind of undiagnosed cardiomyopathy or other genetic cardiac condition before the incident. Or he could have suffered from commotio cordis, which can occur even in perfectly healthy individuals. Normally, lectical signals flow through your heart muscles in a typical progression that prompts the different chambers of your heart to squeeze and then relax in a coordinated manner. There is a a brief 40-millisecond window during each of these cycles when your ventricles are relaxing and your heart’s electrical system is particularly vulnerable to trauma. If your chest gets hit right at this moment by say a fist, a foot, a helmet, or a hard ball, it could result in abnormal electrical burst in your heart, sending the electrical signals out of whack so that you suffer a cardiac arrest. It’s kind of like Fonzie hitting the jukebox at a specific place in the TV series Happy Days.

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This is a very rare event with approximately 10 to 20 reported cases each year, according to a publication in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology. The vast majority of victims have been male, and the sport where commotio cordis most frequently happens is baseball. Typically, it’s when a baseball hits your left chest wall. That’s why the positions most often affected are who are the line of fast-flying balls, namely pitchers, catchers, and batters.

Those stricken by commotio cordis have on average been 15 years of age with very few being over 20 years old. This may be due in part to the stiffening of your chest wall with age. It also may have to do with the fact that fewer males play with balls after age 20. Harder balls, that is. Harder balls used for sports, that is.

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Now it’s not completely clear whether the male preponderance has been due to more males engaging in contact sports historically. If you haven’t noticed, many females do tend to have some differences in the structure of their chests. And males and females do differ in the incidence of other arrhythmic conditions such as long-QT syndrome and Brugada syndrome.

It remains to be seen whether commotio cordis or some other heart condition led to Hamlin’s currently critical condition. Right now, the hope is that Hamlin will be able to recover from this life-threatening situation. Currently, it’s not clear what his prognosis may be. One thing that’s clear though, you never know how low anti-vaxxers may go to try to further their agenda.