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So there have been a lot of people suddenly collapsing or dying recently. Or have there? My Twitter feed certainly seems to think so. Off the top of my head we have Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well. This does seem... odd? I can't remember a lot of people just suddenly collapsing and dying in the past although I remember Hank Gathers from 1990 as a rare exception.
Now, I'm willing to accept that it's possible that sudden deaths of healthy people may be normal-ish thing. Possibly this is just signal-boosted noise. As a heuristic, no one I know personally has collapsed so it's presumably not incredibly widespread. We also have the possibility that Covid itself, not vaccines, is causing these deaths.
The problem is that, as a layperson, it is nearly impossible for me to obtain unbiased information about this phenomenon. I encourage you to search Google for "vaccine death". The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.
On the other hand, on Twitter, (where free speech is truly allowed now), #vaccinedeath is allowed to trend. However, the results for that hashtag tend to be a lot of anecdotes of sudden collapses mixed in with spurious assertions about vaccine safety.
What's a normal person to do in this information environment? For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself. However, I have little confidence in this assessment. And I have no faith that I will be able to reach a confident assessment. When counter-narrative information is suppressed by the media and by the scientific apparatus, how can we trust anything they say? But it doesn't mean the counter-narrative is correct either. It just means there is no way to be confident without a free exchange of ideas.
Victoria Lee was pretty clearly a suicide, given the admonition in her sister's announcement of her death to "please check on your loved ones." As for Damar Hamlin, "According to Tadwalkar, Hamlin likely experienced a rare complication called commotio cordis — ventricular fibrillation, a type of cardiac arhythmia, caused by the injury to the chest when he made a tackle.".
There has been an increase in heart attacks among relatively young people, but that increase started [at the beginning of the pandemic] (https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-surges-linked-to-spike-in-heart-attacks/)
I thought the commotio cordis explanation was likely debunked by the resuscitation?
Yes it’s been debunked and the article he cites has the statistics to do most of the debunking
“study from 2002Trusted Source evaluating 128 cases of commotio cordis found that 78% occurred in people under the age of 18 — 62% of whom were playing a competitive sport at the time the attack.
About 75% of the deaths occurred in people playing baseball, ice hockey, and softball, most of which took place after being struck in the chest by the ball or puck, Mokashi said.”
Basically use those stats on 128 cases and commotio cordis incredibly rare and hence very doubtful to be the Hamlin case. Plus combined with needing to be resuscitated twice and his longer term hospital stay (pronged actually had commotio and returned to play 2 days later).
You are using the wrong denominator. You seem to be looking at (cases of commito cordis)/(number of athletes). But, to determine whether it is likely to be the cause of Hamlin's case, you need to look at (cases of commito cordis)/(number of athletes who collapse from heart conditions). This article says that it is in fact the second most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes.
https://twitter.com/Covid19Critical/status/1612925178111234050
From your link, it's 3% of football deaths that are attributed to commotio cordis. I followed through and found it was 7 out of 243 deaths across 20 years, among high school and college aged players.
I'm skeptical that a grown man, heavily muscled and padded, suffered from commotio cordis by getting run into by a receiver. There's no hard projectile, he's not a teenager, and his chest is both muscled and protected. I just think it's grasping at straws to conclude it's CC instead of some other cardiac issue (100 out of 243 deaths in football over those 20 years).
Also the nature of the hit wasn’t in the open field where there was a lot of force. It was a relatively tame hit.
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