NFL’s Damar Hamlin refuses to disclose what caused sudden cardiac arrest
Twenty-four-year-old NFL player Damar Hamlin is refusing to divulge what physicians say caused his sudden cardiac arrest in early January which led to his collapse on the field mid-game. The incident marked the first reported NFL game suspended due to an injury.
Hamlin was released from the hospital on January 11th and has reportedly been recovering well. The Buffalo Bills safety told Good Morning America Monday that he’s “doing great” and says that doctors “guarantee” he’ll play football again.
News outlets have been trying to shut down suggestions that Hamlin’s cardiac event may have been caused by the COVID-19 shots even though the injections have been shown to correlate to cardiac events, particularly in athletes. In the last three months, five former or current NFL players have died unexpectedly and a sixth was sidelined due to blood clots. 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.
On Monday, Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan asked Hamlin what caused his cardiac arrest.
“You’re 24, peak physical condition, can run circles around me right now — how did doctors describe what happened to you?”
After a dramatically long pause, Hamlin answered: “That’s something I want to stay away from.”
“I know from my experience at the NFL, they do more tests than anything,” said Strahan. “And in the course of you having your physical, did anybody ever come back and say you had a heart issue or anything that was abnormal?”
“Honestly no,” answered the football athlete. “I’ve always been a healthy, young, fit, energetic human being, let alone athlete. So it was just something that was just — we’re still processing and I’m still talking through with my doctors just to see what everything was.”
Following the cardiac arrest, media outlets rushed to deny any role the COVID-19 vaccine may have had in Hamlin’s injury, citing studies from 2014 and before the COVID-19 vaccine.
They also trotted out allied doctors to suggest Hamlin suffered from commotio cordis, a condition that affects between 10 to 20 people per year.
But even those doctors were not 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 acknowledged “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.”
