Baseless !

For the last month or so I have noticed a seeming increase in the reporting of sudden death in younger individuals. Now granted this apparent increase may be purely coincidental, but because of my scientific background, I started to annotate some of these cases as follows:

-Dax Tejera, an executive producer (EP) at ABC News, has died from cardiac arrest on Dec. 23, just a few weeks ahead of his 38th birthday.

-Joseph Marley, the eldest son of eight-time Grammy-winner Stephen Marley and second grandchild of reggae legend Bob Marley, has died at age 31. The Jamaican-American recording artist and DJ, known professionally as Jo Mersa, was found unresponsive in a vehicle on Tuesday, Dec. 27. A cause of death has not been revealed, although South Florida radio station WZPP has reported that the artist died of an asthma attack.

-Actor Brad William Henke has died at the age of just 56 years old.

The man’s agent, Sheree Cohen, informed the Hollywood Reporter that Henke passed away in his sleep on 11/29/22. (Henke, whose acting career included a role on “Orange Is the New Black,” previously played in the NFL — he got to play in the 1990 Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos.)

-Uche Nwaneri, a former offensive guard for the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, was found dead at his home over the weekend, his wife and the team announced on Monday. He was 38. Preliminary autopsy results indicate the 38-year-old may have suffered a heart attack, said Tippecanoe County Coroner Carrie Costello, who also noted that there are no signs of foul play.

However, this suspicion of mine tilted dramatically toward reality when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field on 1/2/23 after making a tackle in the first quarter of his team’s Monday Night Football clash with the Cincinnati Bengals before 23+ million viewers. Hamlin is 24 years old, and reports indicate that he was in ventricular fibrillation. This means that if his heart was not converted back into a normal rhythm, he would have died. The medical term for this is “sudden cardiac death.” Reportedly Hamlin received CPR on the field for about nine minutes and was shocked back into a normal heart rhythm prior to being taken to the hospital.

Whereas Hamlin’s episode may have been just a quirk, the question must be asked, “How often does sudden death occur in athletes?”

Authored by structural biologist Panagis Polykretis, and board-certified internist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, a study cited data  that found from 2021 to 2022, at least 1,616 cardiac arrests or other major medical issues have been globally documented in vaccinated athletes, with 1,114 of those being fatal.

The global data showed that between 2021 to 2022, former and current American athletes made up 279 of the mortalities.

Athletes have a lower chance of cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death as compared to nonathletes. A 2016 U.S. study calculated that nonathletes, compared to athletes, have a 29 times higher chance of sudden cardiac death.

One of the reasons is because “athletes are screened out for the common causes of sudden death on the playing field,” Dr. Peter McCullough told The Epoch Times.

Players are screened for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which makes up almost 50 percent of sudden cardiac deaths in athletes (remember Hank Gathers back in March, 1990). Other than hypertrophic cardiomyopathy there are other less common heart abnormalities, which can precipitate sudden cardiac death. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy as well as most of these other heart abnormalities are picked up by screening tests. The intensive screening is what makes competitive-level sports safer than everyday sporting activities, McCullough argued.

From the Epoch Times:

“In the United States, it is estimated that 100 to 150 athletes die every year from sudden death. However, one study showed that in 2022 alone, over 190 deaths from cardiac arrests have been reported in current and former athletes.”

If, in fact, the number of sudden cardiac deaths has increased substantially from 100-150 -> 190 in 2022, the question is why.

Could this be related to the Covid vaccine? The honest answer at this point is that we do not know. I find it interesting that an article from the Washington Post by Zakrzewski & Weber does not hesitate to call any claim that Covid vaccines might be associated with cardiac deaths as “baseless.” Also I find it interesting that in that same WaPo article that the  non-MD authors manage to sneak in anti-Trump and anti-Musk comments that intimate that any questions concerning the vaccine and it’s safety are political misinformation.

Hopefully, God forbid, no other professional athletes will need to suffer the same catastrophe as what happened to Damar Hamlin. Nonetheless, be forewarned that it might take another sudden death episode in a professional athlete to make the WaPo authors stop calling vaccine suspicions “baseless.”

1/6/23