The Elephant is Getting Harder to Ignore

Perhaps it's time to consider the questions too many want to ignore

First, let’s all be clear: no one has any idea why 24-year-old Damar Hamlin collapsed Monday night while making a routine tackle during an NFL game. You can watch the replay a million times and find nothing about the play that stands out other than the aftermath. At the same time, you have to be willfully ignorant to not wonder if this is not another in the growing number of inexplicable events that have struck athletes and other healthy people over the past couple of years. The site above is upfront in saying that it is not drawing conclusions as to what caused these incidents, but the people behind also do not pretend to have lived in a cave since 2021. They dare to consider the question that we are apparently still not allowed to ask.

In that vein, I’ll ask it: if the Covid vaccine is not at least a contributing factor to these cases, then what is causing them? Almost like clockwork, NPR informs us that “many of the doctors following his case online have narrowed it down to one likely cause.” Because if you cannot trust a diagnosis made by people who are following a story online, what can you trust. The ‘consensus’ diagnosis is commotio cordis, which stems from a hard blow to the chest at a specific point in the cardiac cycle, thus disrupting it. Okay. Given all of the football games played professionally, collegiately, and at the scholastic level, and all of the hits involved, wouldn’t we have multiple instances of this?

What we do have is a growing number of stories involving otherwise healthy people who have “died suddenly.” There have been enough such incidents both inside and outside of sports that a Facebook page now catalogs them. In the past week alone, about 15 ‘unexpected’ deaths are listed with victims ranging from athletes to cops to a soldier to musicians. There is also a Twitter feed from a biomedical and cancer researcher trained at Johns Hopkins named James Olsson that provides a running commentary on these cases. He is just as convinced as the doctors cited in the NPR story about what caused Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest. Hint: he and they do not agree.  

It’s one thing not to know why something happened, but it is quite another to continue living in this quasi-religious atmosphere where one is instantly pilloried for daring to ask obvious questions. Right on cue, Media Matters was on the case to chronicle the right-wing crazies who dared to blaspheme against the wonder drug. MM instantly glommed onto the commotio cordis narrative while castigating those who blamed vaccine side effects – and this is the best part – “without a shred of evidence.” Excuse me, but what evidence have doctors who did not know of Hamlin’s existence before Monday night produce to justify their long-distance diagnoses?

Perhaps we can all agree that no one should engage in this tactic and that pretending to know a person’s condition without having examined that person is neither medicine nor science. It’s guesswork and as we have seen for the past two years, it is guesswork with a motive. The same people who lied to us about the efficacy of lockdowns, the benefits of masking, the need to close schools, the utility of HCQ and Ivermectin, and the vaccine itself now wonder why anyone would be skeptical of their diagnosis. As we have been lectured so often, let’s follow the science.  

There are about two dozen reported cases of commotio cordis every year. A UNC cardiologist says the condition typically occurs in martial arts or sports that involve projectiles like baseballs or hockey pucks. It seldom occurs in football. Again, given the number of collisions in the thousands of football games played every year, we would have heard of this condition by now if it was a serious problem. But we haven’t. Maybe it’s because fewer than 30 cases are reported annually across all sports and most of them involve teenage athletes. So which scenario is more likely – a condition that happens a couple of dozen times per year and almost never to anyone over the age of 20, or something that has involved about 1,500 people of varying ages in the past 18 months?

The new narrative is made less plausible by research from Israel from 2021, which found “a probable link between the second dose of Pfizer vaccine and the appearance of myocarditis among men aged 16 to 30.” Pfizer, of course, dismissed the study, saying no causal link had been established. Fair enough; we all know that correlation is not causation but it’s reasonable to wonder how much correlation there must be before a causal link can at least be discussed. Which is part of the problem. Certain things have not been part of the discussion and the trend continues today with the Hamlin case.

About a year after the Israeli study, a London cardiologist who was once an avid vaccine proponent put out a paper calling for vaccines to be discontinued until there is an independent study of all relevant data. His paper appears in two parts in the Journal of Insulin Resistance and links to both can be found in the article cited above. What makes this noteworthy is that Dr. Aseem Malhotra took the vaccine early on and frequently promoted it on British television shows and other media appearances. His change of heart is partly due to UK data that show 14,000 more cardiac arrests in 2021 after the vaccine rollout than occurred in 2020.

To finish where we started, no one is sure what caused Monday’s incident, not that the uncertainty has stopped people on either side of the debate. But the difference is that one of those sides refuses to debate at all; it’s as if the one variable that was introduced in 2021 – coercively to populations such as govt employees, hospital staff, military members, and professional athletes – should be discounted from the discussion completely. Why? Instead of the open, honest debate that is so desperately needed, we get speculation disguised as medical expertise combined with the oh-so-predictable attack on the game of football itself.

What Time begins by calling “The nightmare scenario” may be just that, but not for the reasons that the magazine envisions. The issue is not football or any other contact sport. The issue is the elephant that keeps making a mess of the living room while people pretend not to see it. Whether the vaccine was a factor or not in Damar Hamlin’s case is not about politics or talking points or owning the other side. It’s about truth and it’s about the health of tens of millions of people, far too many of whom are dying “unexpectedly.” At the risk of sounding repetitive, I’ll ask again – if the vaccine is not a factor in any of these injuries or deaths, then what is? The reluctance to pursue that question screams volumes.