1,598 Athletes Experienced Cardiac Arrest After Receiving a COVID-19 Vaccine

A peer-reviewed paper found that 1,598 athletes experienced cardiac arrest after receiving a COVID vaccine since January 2021 and 1,101 of the 1,598 athletes died — 279 from the U.S.

It is rare for young athletes to experience cardiac arrest or die while playing their sport, but since the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in Dec. 2020, many have suspected this very thing is happening.

A peer-reviewed Letter to the Editor published on Dec. 21 in the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology by Dr. Peter McCullough and biologist Panagis Polykretis found that 1,598 athletes experienced cardiac arrest after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine since January 2021 and 1,101 of the 1,598 athletes died. Between 2021 and 2022, data show 279 athletes were from the U.S.

To put this in perspective, over a 38-year period from 1966 to 2004, 1,101 athletes under the age of 35 died.

Athletes are at a much lower risk of experiencing cardiac arrest compared to non-athletes, and almost all U.S. states require pre‐participation screening of participants in organized sports. The purpose of screening is to “provide medical clearance for participation in competitive sports through routine and systematic evaluations intended to identify clinically relevant and preexisting cardiovascular abnormalities and thereby reduce the risks associated with organized sports.”

Players are screened for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which makes up almost 50% of sudden cardiac deaths in athletes, as well as other heart abnormalities. According to a paper published in General Cardiology, athletic sudden cardiac death is a “rare event.”

A study published in Circulation identified 1,866 sudden deaths in U.S. athletes from 1980 to 2006 in thirty-eight sports — with 1,049 (56%) attributed to cardiovascular causes. Of these 1,049 deaths, 690 could be reliably attributed to 44 documented primary cardiovascular diseases, with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy occurring in 251 cases.

According to Good Sciencing, the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland, studied international data banks from 1966 to 2004 and found 1,101 sudden deaths in athletes under 35 years of age during that entire period — an average of 29 athletes per year.

From 2005 to 2006, there was an average of 66 deaths per year, with 82% occurring during competition or training. There were 89 deaths reported in January 2022 alone.

As of Nov. 27, 2022, Good Sciencing had identified 1,520 incidences of cardiac arrests in athletes, with 1,043 cases resulting in death. As of Dec. 9, they were reviewing 39 new reports.

In an interview with The Vigalanti Fox, McCullough said he believes COVID vaccines cause heart inflammation, and then a “big surge of adrenaline” an athlete experiences during sports is “triggering these deaths.”

A recent study carried out by a team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital found that young adults and adolescents who experience myocarditis (a type of heart inflammation) following vaccination with an mRNA-based COVID vaccine like Pfizer and Moderna had increased levels of viral spike protein in their bloodstream.

According to the most recent data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), between Dec. 14, 2020, and Dec. 23, 2022, there were 8,201 reports of myocardial infarction and cardiac arrest in all age groups following COVID-19 vaccines. It is estimated that VAERS has an underreporting factor of 31. If this is true, there have potentially been as many as 254,231 heart attacks and cardiac arrests following COVID-19 vaccination. (This does not take into account the growing number of myocarditis reports deleted by the CDC from VAERS.)

There have been 24,958 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis reported to VAERS during this same period, with 18,911 cases attributed to Pfizer, 5,557 cases to Moderna, and 431 to Johnson & Johnson. There are 59 reports of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy following COVID-19 vaccination.

In a study published on Nov. 27 in Clinical Research in Cardiology, German researchers evaluated the autopsies of 25 people who died unexpectedly within 20 days of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. Four individuals had myocarditis without any other disease signal that may have caused the unexpected death.

Researchers concluded the deaths were due to cardiac failure and myocarditis and that “myocarditis can be a potentially lethal complication following mRNA-based anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.”