To put it bluntly, this claim, still flying around the internet, isn't just inaccurate or misleading, it's the exact opposite of the truth.
To his credit, the author of the OpEdNews piece that repeated this claim deleted it after I brought the truth to his attention. Interestingly, however, he didn't give up on the possibility (or perhaps the hope) that something similar might be true, adding, "It remains to be seen how many pilots will die from the 'vaccines.'"
The next claim in that post is also popular on anti-vax sites: "Soccer players and other athletes are collapsing at sixty times the normal rate after the vax from heart failure." A google search came up with 5,860,000 citations.
According to Reuters, the first source for this kind of claim was an article on the website of the Israeli edition of Real Time News, which listed 108 "professional athletes, coaches, college and youth athletes" who have died since December 2020, and which attributed those deaths to the Covid vaccines.
Reuters fact checkers examined the list and found that it included American football players, archers, gymnasts, badminton players, ballet dancers, rugby, soccer, tennis, table tennis, baseball, cricket, ice and field hockey, handball, volleyball and basketball players, body builders, boxers, canoe racers, cyclists and weightlifters. The list ranged from young amateurs to retired professional athletes, and included ". . . four soccer coaches, . . ., one body building coach, one cricket teacher, one athletics trainer, a golf caddie, a marching band member and a doctor who died while out jogging."
Using the same approach of scouring news sources for athlete deaths, the story that the OpEdNews piece cited featured an even longer list published December 22 on the website of Global Research, a self-described anti-globalization organization. That story included brief news excerpts reporting on 187 athletes from a wide variety of spots around the world who collapsed and/or died in 2021, followed by a separate list of another 180, again "from all over the world," which together listed 209 deaths.
Those two lists combined are the source of the article's headline, "367 Athlete Cardiac Arrests, Serious Issues, 209 Dead, After Covid Shot."
Although many of the news snippets don't mention vaccination, and although some of the events took place long after vaccination, this article, like the earlier one, assumes a causal link between the vaccines and these events, leading to an urgent conclusion: "We are dealing with a crimes [sic] against humanity on an unprecedented scale. The Killer vaccine must be withdrawn immediately."
Of course this seemingly large number of deaths among athletes is meaningful only if it is in fact abnormal and represents an actual increase from previous years. The article presents that as self-evident, leading with the comment: "It is definitely not normal for young athletes to suffer from cardiac arrests or to die while playing their sport, but this year it is happening." The authors challenged potential fact-checkers to comb news reports from past years for comparable events, writing, "Where are the fact-checkers? . . . They are nowhere to be found because this number of athlete deaths is abnormal and they know it."
It turns out that fact-checkers don't have to search for and count up news reports of similar deaths in past years because there's a much simpler way to find out if 209 sudden deaths among athletes in a year is unusual or not.
Not surprisingly, scientists have known about and studied sudden deaths among athletes long before Covid and the Covid vaccines. A literature review from June, 2017, published in the NIH National Library of Medicine, found that the rate of sudden cardiac deaths (SCDs) among college athletes is around one death per 50,000 athlete-years, and among high school athletes, one per 50,000 to 80,000 athlete-years. A similar study of older athletes, published in 2016, found a comparable rate of one sudden death per 50,000 athlete-years.
As we saw, the authors of the athlete death lists did not limit themselves to young athletes or athletes in the US alone. They scoured news reports for sudden deaths among active and retired athletes, coaches, trainers and other sports figures from pretty much every sport worldwide. The first 25 names on the Global Research list include soccer players from Egypt, France, Ghana, Portugal and Spain, runners from Norway and Scotland, handball players from Croatia and Portugal, volleyball players from India, a basketball player from the Philippines, a rugby player from Australia, a boxer, a cricket player and a bodybuilder from the US and a darts player from the UK.
It turns out that the world is a very big place and there are a lot of athletes out there, orders of magnitude more than most of us would have guessed. It's estimated that worldwide there are 500 million active volleyball players, 450 million basketball players, 300 million table tennis players, 240 million registered soccer players, 220 million badminton players, 65 million baseball players, 60 million cricket players, 19 million handball players, etc., etc., etc.
According to the NCAA, there are 8 million US high school athletes and an additional 495,000 college athletes. We would expect 110 sudden cardiac deaths just among those young US athletes every year. It's estimated that 25 percent of Americans - around 82 million -- are active in at least one sport. If we conservatively estimate that their risk of sudden death is similar to that of healthy young athletes, 1 in 80,000 per year, we would expect more than 1000 such deaths every year in the US alone. If, as the authors of the article do, we cast our net worldwide, we're looking at more than 2 billion athletes. Let's be even more conservative and assume that just one out of every 100,000 of them dies suddenly in a given year. That means there are probably 20,000 such deaths every year, including, of course 2021.
In other words, far more athletes quite likely 100 times more--die suddenly every year than the few that were documented in 2021, assumed to be abnormal, and with such certainty blamed on the vaccines. Had the authors of the two stories that were the source of the "60 times the normal rate" really done their homework, they could have stretched their list of athlete deaths in 2021 into the tens of thousands. But it's clear that they could have done the same for 2020, 2019, and earlier years as well.
The bottom line is that the lists of deaths on which this claim is based, although of course tragic and shocking at first glance, are absolutely meaningless as evidence of the alleged dangers of the Covid vaccines.
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