Media diagnose injured NFL player with extremely rare condition
Mainstream media have diagnosed NFL player Damar Hamlin with an extremely rare condition to explain the 24-year-old athlete’s sudden cardiac arrest on the football field Monday night, which caused the game's suspension. Hamlin remains in critical condition as of this report.
News outlets have been vociferous against suggestions that Hamlin’s cardiac event may have been caused by the COVID-19 shots even though they have been shown to correlate to cardiac events, particularly in athletes.
“Damar Hamlin: How anti-vaxxers exploited player's collapse,” wrote the BBC.
“COVID vaccines aren’t killing athletes,” insisted The Atlantic, which cited a study from 2014-2016. The media outlet also brought fact checks to support its claim.
“The inevitable, grotesque effort to blame vaccines for Damar Hamlin’s collapse,” wrote Washington Post.
Instead, mainstream media have trotted out allied doctors to suggest Hamlin suffered from commotio cordis, a condition that affects between 10 to 20 people per year.
“Did Damar Hamlin experience commotio cordis? What to know about the rare phenomenon,” reported NPR.
“Damar Hamlin May Have Had Commotio Cordis, Cardiologists Say. Here’s What To Know About The Rare Event,” said Buzzfeed News.
“COVID-19 vaccines almost certainly didn’t cause Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest. Here’s what may have,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.
While the Times did not bring any evidence to support its claim that it was not the vaccine, it suggested the cause might have been commotio cordis.
“In the absence of definitive findings from Hamlin’s cardiac workup, doctors will have to consider a diagnosis that explains roughly 10 to 20 deaths a year in the United States, mostly among young male athletes: commotio cordis,” said the Times.
To support its assertion, the news outlet quoted a cardiologist, just as other news sites have done.
But even those cardiologists do not sound convinced.
“I've been watching football my whole life and I've never seen this happen. This is so incredibly rare, it’s like winning the Powerball or getting hit by lightning twice,” Dr. Grant Simons told Buzzfeed. “There's about a 30th of a second that the heart is even vulnerable to this. So not only does the hit have to be in the right spot on the heart and the right amount of force, it also has to be perfectly timed.”
Even the Los Angeles Times acknowledges “it takes ‘the perfect storm’ of circumstances to result in the death of a seemingly healthy young person”, explaining "that if hit in exactly the right place (where the right ventricle receives blood from the right atrium) and at exactly the right instant (a 20-millisecond span when the walls of the heart are gearing up for their next pump), the stricken ventricles will begin to beat fast and erratically.”
While media are presenting a condition that affects up to 20 people a year, Frontline News reported that in the last two months, five former or current NFL players have died unexpectedly and a sixth was sidelined due to blood clots.
And while media are citing studies nearly a decade old, an investigation found that in 2021 alone, 183 FIFA athletes suddenly collapsed, leaving 108 dead. In most cases, the cause of the collapse was heart-related, including myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attacks, or cardiac arrest, with the second most prevalent cause being clotting events.
Prominent physicians such as Dr. Simone Gold and top cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough are also citing data showing that as many athletes died in the last two years as in the preceding 38 years.
“From January 2021 to present, 1101 athletes died from cardiac arrest,” tweeted Dr. Gold Tuesday.
“Over a prior 38 years (1966-2004), 1101 athletes under the age of 35 died due to various heart conditions.
“The same number of athletes died in the last TWO years as compared to a prior 38 years.”
