The news of athletes collapsing mid-play on the field has unfortunately become mainstream. On Monday night, millions of NFL viewers watched live as Buffalo Bills’ defensive back 24-year-old Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals game. According to the team’s statement, Hamlin is currently hospitalized in a critical condition.
ESPN, which broadcast the game and was later widely praised for its coverage of the tragic incident, reported:
“The chilling scene midway through the opening quarter led the league to postpone the game about 90 minutes after kickoff.
CPR was administered to Hamlin, 24, on the field for multiple minutes after he collapsed following his tackle of Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins. Hamlin received oxygen, according to the ESPN broadcast, as he was placed in the ambulance and taken off the field some 16 minutes after he collapsed. He then was driven to the nearby University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
According to the Bills, he is currently sedated and listed in critical condition. The University of Cincinnati Medical Center did not anticipate making any statement early Tuesday morning.”
The clip of the incident shows Hamlin falling moments after being involved in the tackling. Hamlin got to his feet, appeared to adjust his helmet with his right hand, then fell backwards about two seconds later, his arms hitting the ground at his sides.
Reportedly, the ambulance arrived at the field within minutes after the fall. Fox New’s Joe Danneman posted on the “Extreme amount of urgency” in treating Hamlin.
Reports say that Hamlin remained lying on the field for nearly 20 minutes as paramedics fought for his life, surrounded by human shield of players and referees.
Jordon Rooney, Hamlin’s marketing representative and friend, and the CEO of sports marketing agency Jaster Athletes, updated his Twitter followers on Hamlin’s status around 10:30 p.m. EDT on Monday, saying the player’s vitals were “back to normal” and that he has been “put to sleep with a breathing tube down his throat.” He added that doctors were running tests on Hamlin.
Rooney’s tweet came shortly after NFL public relations representative Brian McCarthy tweeted a statement on Hamlin’s status.
Rooney appeared on ABC’s Good Morning, America on Tuesday. “I can’t speak specifically on his medical condition,” Rooney said. “I will say that he’s fighting, he’s a fighter. The family is in good spirits. We’re honestly just taking it minute by minute, hour by hour.”
The incident during one of the world’s most televised sports events naturally gained lots of traction in the national and international media and prompted an outpouring of prayers on social media platforms. Some observers, including Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, pointed out the fact that Hamlin is just one of many athletes experiencing heart attacks on the field, tweeting, “This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.”
For that correct observation, Kirk got blasted by the mainstream media — see this Washington Post report — for promoting an anti-vaccine agenda for “political reasons” and without medical “evidence,” even though Kirk did not mention vaccines in his tweet.
What caused a professional NFL athlete to collapse?
“This was traumatic,” said emergency medicine physician Dr. Anthony Cardillo to ABC7, describing how Hamlin was hit in the upper-chest area. Most likely, suggested the physician, Hamlin had a so-called “R-on-T phenomenon,” an uncommon type of lethal arrhythmia. According to Cardillo, Hamlin got hit at an unfortunate moment right when his heart was repolarizing itself, and that triggered ventricular arrhythmia, an abnormal heart rhythm that affects the lower chambers of the heart responsible for pumping blood.
Family medicine physician Dr. Chris Haddock also pointed to the possibility of the purely unfortunate timing of the physical stress on Hamlin’s heart, “As a physician I believe Damar Hamlin was likely suffering from commotio cordis where a blow to the chest at a precise moment in the electrical cycle stops the heart,” adding, “Those trying to tie this to vaccine status to project their unscientific beliefs are terrible, horrible people.”
Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most published cardiologists in America, originally considered that Hamlin’s injury was, indeed, due to commotio cordis, according to Steve Kirsch, who spoke with the doctor. Kirsch wrote on his Substack, “Peter [McCullough] believes that the ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation could have been set up by the vaccine if he took it.”
McCullough opined that the vaccination status “must” be considered, (emphasis in the original),
“I watched the play live both as a fan and a cardiologist and I saw blunt neck and chest trauma, a brief recovery after the tackle and then a classic cardiac arrest. I have communicated to one of the most experienced trainers in the world and we agree that it was a cardiac arrest in the setting of a big surge of adrenalin. If Damar Hamlin indeed took one of the COVID-19 vaccines, then subclinical vaccine-induced myocarditis must be considered in the differential diagnosis.
Kirsch, a founder of the Vaccine Research Safety Foundation (VSRF), noted that “the Buffalo Bills is a 100% vaccinated team” and that Hamlin was vaccinated.
How common are such incidents? According to the 2006 Switzerland study, on average, between 1966 and 2006, there were 29 athletes dying a year. “These days, we’d be grateful to see one month with fewer than 29 such events,” wrote Edward Dowd in his recent book, adding that in December 2021 alone, as many as 90 professional athletes died, and about as many in January 2022.
In a statement for The New American, Dowd said that while he studies the metadata and does not comment on individual people, “there have been many cases of mid-game collapses of seemingly healthy athletes since 2021” and that his book “contains hundreds of examples.”
The possibility of the Covid shots being connected with the unseen die-off of young athletes was brought up, among others, by British pharmacologist and former Pfizer executive Dr. Michael Yeadon back in November 2021. Reflecting on “two dozen incidents” of athletes passing in the pitch within a couple of weeks, he wrote,
You’ll immediately apprehend how unusual this is, and it’s not bad luck.
It’s because only recently has covid19 vaccination reached these age groups, late teens to late 20s.
In a September 2022 interview with The New American, Idaho-based pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole maintained that the continued trend of heart attacks in athletes is linked to Covid vaccinations that are known to damage the cardiovascular system and the heart in particular.
In a statement to The New American on the Hamlin incident, Dr. Cole stressed,
The honest answer is, we don’t know the exact cause of the cardiac arrest of Damar Hamlin. There is certainly much, much speculation going around, however, common things are common, and should be considered first. In this era of excess injection of a gene-based product it is fair to ask the question of whether the individual had the injection recently. We don’t know, and this is private medical information.… We can only wonder and again hope for the best.
Cole further elaborated that the well-documented excess mortality and disability rates among young populations are a major concern that requires urgent scientific attention, and that “the problem is for the last year and a half, these sudden incidences of cardiac arrest in athletes have been excessive and concerning,” yet “the inability to ask questions has been rampant societally due to narrative control in science.”
In June 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) placed a warning on Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots, stating that they were connected to “increased risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart) following vaccination.”
The NFL never imposed a Covid vaccine mandate, but created numerous restrictions for unvaccinated players and staffers.
In March 2022, the 95-percent vaccinated league dropped all its Covid protocols, citing “encouraging trends” in Covid numbers.
