Lisa Marie Presley, 54, Dies After Sudden Cardiac Arrest

Singer, songwriter, Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, has sadly died at 54 years of age. According to Jack Irvin and Liz McNeil writing for People magazine, paramedics responded to Thursday morning call that a woman in Calabasas, California, had suffered a cardiac arrest. That woman in her 50’s turned out to be Lisa Marie Presley. Upon arrival at Lisa Marie Presley’s home, paramedics commenced cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on her and after reportedly detecting “signs of life,” transported her to a local hospital. Later that afternoon, Priscilla Presley tweeted the following about her daughter’s condition:

Tragically, though, Lisa Marie Presley did not end up surviving in in the hospital.

Her death prompted an outpouring of tributes on social media. For example, MTV posted the following on Twitter:

Unfortunately, tributes weren’t the only thing being poured on to social media. The anti-vaccination personalities and accounts were at it once again. They quickly began pouring their typical venti trap-pucino with two scoops of unfounded claims and five pumps of conspiracy theories all over social media in attempts to convince everyone that Covid-19 vaccines were somehow involved. That’s even though so far no one close to Lisa Marie Pressley or her medical care has even mentioned such a possibility. But such is the attention that any celebrity death seems to get these days.

Attention was something that Lisa Marie Pressley was likely used to ever she was born to Elvis and Priscilla nine months after their wedding. That’s what happens when you are the only daughter of the guy who was dubbed America’s King of Rock and Roll and belted out classics such as “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Jailhouse Rock”, “Suspicious Minds”, and “Burning Love.” Of course, her father wasn’t the only reason why she gained fame. Some of it came from her high profile marriages to Danny Keough, Michael Jackson, and Nicholas Cage. Some of it came from the three albums that she recorded and released: To Whom It May Concern in 2003, So What in 2005, and Storm & Grace in 2012. That first debut album reached Number Five on the Billboard 200 albums chart and went gold in 2003 with over 500,000 copies sold in the U.S. And then there were her various philanthropic endeavors, such as overseeing the Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation and participating in Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network and the Dream Factory. In fact, in 2011, then-Governor of Tennessee Bill Haslam proclaimed June 24 a day to recognize Presley’s charitable efforts. She also received a Certificate of Proclamation from the then-Mayor of New Orleans, Mitchell J. Landrieu, for how she contributed to the Big Easy.

Her life wasn’t exactly a Big Easy, though. As actress Lydia Cornell alluded to, Presley lost her son Benjamin to suicide on July 12, 2020:

It’s not clear what had precipitated Lisa Marie Presley’s cardiac arrest. She had made several public appearances in the week leading up to Thursday such as celebrating her father’s birth anniversary at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, on Sunday and attending the Golden Globes on Tuesday. During those reports, there were no reports of her experiencing any particular symptoms.

Now, a cardiac arrest is also known as sudden cardiac arrest, because it’s when you your heart stops beating suddenly. People typically don’t suffer gradual or anticipated cardiac arrests. Your heart doesn’t tend to say, “Hey, dude, I’m going to stop pumping blood to the rest of your body in a few days because I can’t. I just can’t.” A cardiac arrest is most often the culmination of the heart’s electrical system going haywire with either an abnormally rapid or an abnormally slow heart rhythm resulting.

A number of conditions can predispose you to cardiac arrest. Abnormal heart rhythms can result in heart muscle that’s been damaged, scarred, or thickened from prior heart attacks, persistent high blood pressure, problems with your heart valves, congenital heart conditions, or other issues. They can also emerge when your heart’s electrical system has abnormalities such as in Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and Long QT syndrome. Certain medications and certain recitational drugs can lead to cardiac arrest as well. And a study published in 2020 in the BMJ found cardiac arrest to be common in critically ill patients with Covid-19.

But despite this range of possibilities take a wild guess as to what a bunch of anti-vaccination social media accounts have tried to blame as soon as news of Lisa Marie Presley’s cardiac arrest emerged. Yes, you guessed it, Covid-19 vaccines. It’s the same storyline that they had tried to push soon after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s had collapsed on the football field as pointed out by the following tweet:

Yeah, many of these blue suede ghouls won’t hesitate to use all kinds of trickery. They’ve even posted “screen shots of random women named Lisa Marie,” as Teddy Wilson, who maintains a substack newsletter called Radical Reports that covers the Radical Right, mentioned:

It’s the same old song that anti-vaccination accounts, many of which are anonymous, have been trying to drum into everyone. These days after seemingly every celebrity’s death, especially if it is sudden, anti-vaccination social media accounts will jump to action, spreading claims that the Covid-19 vaccines were somehow responsible. Yet, these accounts will provide very little actual evidence supporting such claims. All they seem to do is try to prompt suspicious minds, so to speak.

It’s bad enough to suffer the loss of loved one. But to have your loved one’s death be exploited for the purpose of anti-vaccination agendas? That’s next level stuff in a bad way. You could say to the people behind these anti-vaccination agendas, many of whom are anonymous, to whom it may concern,