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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 The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.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.
1 negation, and a couple of weird anecdotes.
The NFL player who collapsed had it happen due to a collision with direct impact to the heart. This was a completely different case than covid related myocarditis.
On the weird side, there have been 2 unique occurrences in the soccer world. Christian Ericsson is arguably the most high-profile death (and subsequent resuscitation) on the soccer field due to spontaneous cardiac arrest a few months after his vaccine. Players dropping dead isn't entirely unheard of. But Ericsson is the most high profile. On a similar note, Sergio Aguero, one of the greatest football players of his era, had to suddenly retire after his new club (in 2021) identified scarring on his heart.
Curiously, both players had spent their entire careers with world class medical teams, without any of them having any inkling of such major heart tissue scarring. Barcelona (Aguero's new club) famously called it gross negligence, saying that Aguero should have never been allowed to be a pro player, because someone during his 20 career should have caught this. This is after Aguero had just broken the record for most premier league career goals in the history of the sport at arguably the world's best team. Something doesn't compute.
I'd assumed they were talking about Uche Nwaneri, but he wasn't in the NFL anymore.
It's kind of amazing how much coverage of current and former NFL players (and other staff) there is. Looks like (former) NFL player dying isn't some rare occurrence, even for younger ones. I wonder what the life expectancy of an NFL player is.
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This sort of thing isn't unheard of in other sports: cyclist Michael Goolaerts died in the 2018 Paris-Roubaix race of cardiac arrest.
I have two cautions about your anecdote here: first, professional athletes are likely using performance-enhancing drugs (without making any specific accusations). Many of these are pretty well-linked with cardiac issues (testosterone, EPO, and various stimulants). A number of sudden cardiac arrest incidents in young athletes have seen hushed rumors since at least the 1980s, corresponding to the rise of EPO.
Secondly, "[professional] should never have been allowed to play due to risk" belies the fact that many players at the top level are exceptionally focused and don't take well to being sidelined. It's plausible to me that a player getting such advice from their doctor might choose to ignore it because they already accept risk to their bodies in sport (see NFL players), and because their alternative career options are much less lucrative.
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[spent 2 minutes googling here idk]
What if covid itself contributes? this "investigated rates of COVID-19 myocarditis among 1,597 athletes from 13 of the 14 Big Ten universities. They observed an overall prevalence of 2.3%, with 9 cases of clinical myocarditis and 28 cases of subclinical myocarditis". study is here.
And sudden cardiac arrests aren't unheard of in sports, they're just rare. Given there are many sports, many many athletes, a few high-profile people dying isn't that surprising!
Covid almost surely contributes. Internal scarring due to viral infections is well known at this point. The question people are asking is --> do silent/loud symptoms induced by the vaccines (every 6 months, if booster) cause an increase in scarring that is similar to what a serious infection would cause ? I'd rather take a bout of covid every few years, instead of a 6 monthly slow buildup scar-tissue on my heart. Skipping boosters may be a risk worth taking if I am young. (I am not boosted yet)
I am still very much pro-vaccines. I would take the first 2 doses again if I was back in 2020. I have taken every other established vaccine & will vaccinate any child I have at any point. I am just not sold on the mRNA boosters or the risk of serious illness for a sub-30 yr old from any of the current variants of covid.
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