Tuesday, February 07, 2023

The Twitter hashtag #DiedSuddenly has been trending based on the plethora of sudden and unexplained deaths among the young and healthy over the past two years. Stories abound and here are a few found at the time of this writing.

In Australia, “Fit and healthy 21 year old son dies suddenly in his sleep.” From the University of Arizona, “A recent member of Arizona’s men’s swim team has unexpectedly passed away.” In Detroit, a high school basketball player suffered a cardiac arrest during a basketball game. While they restarted his heart, he hasn’t woken up.

Then there was Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin who went into cardiac arrest after an unremarkable hit during a January NFL game. What about aggregate statistics rather than anecdotal stories?

A few brave researchers are chronicling these “sudden” and “unexplained” deaths, as they are described in the media. Here is one report, “An investigation of official statistics has found that the number of athletes who have died since the beginning of 2021 has risen exponentially compared to the yearly number of deaths of athletes officially recorded between 1966 and 2004.”

This trend was indeed worrisome, “So much so that the monthly average number of deaths between January 2021 and April 2022 is 1,700% higher than the monthly average between 1966 and 2004.”

Why isn’t the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishing their own data? If this is all “misinformation,” as big tech and the corporate media describe it, the government health authorities should easily be able to disprove it, rather than calling on social media giants to censor or ban anything contrary to their “safe and effective” mantra.

Despite Big Medicine and the media’s attempts to play this all off as normal, average Americans are noticing and are understandably concerned. Since when is it “normal” for high school and college athletes to have heart attacks and blood clots, often fatal? Why are these daily news stories now compared to years ago when one might hear of only a few cases per year, typically attributed to a previously undiagnosed congenital or other heart anomaly? Why do these cases remain “unexplained” leaving “doctors mystified”?

America has the best medical care system in the world and few medical maladies remain “unexplained”, other than the recent surge in sudden deaths among the young and healthy.

Rasmussen Reports asked Americans what they think about all of this. In a national telephone and online survey of 1,000 adult Americans published a month ago, four questions were asked:

-- Have you received a COVID-19 vaccination?

-- How likely is it that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths?

-- Do you personally know anyone whose death you think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines?

-- Which is closer to your belief, that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, or that people who worry about vaccine safety are spreading conspiracy theories?

How did they answer? 71% of those surveyed were vaccinated, comparable to the national average. Virtually half of respondents don’t believe the “disinformation” mantra propagated by “fact checkers”, mainstream media, and the government. “49% of American adults believe it is likely that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths, including 28% who think it’s very likely.”

Furthermore, “28% of adults say they personally know someone whose death they think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.” And “48% of Americans believe there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.”

The 2022 film “Died Suddenly” reinforces the above concerns, despite critics describing the movie as “baseless," “propaganda” or “pseudoscience." Maybe it is, maybe not. Why doesn’t the CDC do a simple analysis, as Steve Kirsch has suggested, linking death and vaccination records? Kirsch has even offered a 10-to-1 return on a bet anyone wants to make disproving his analysis or conclusions.

Since COVID-19, distrust in medical authorities has declined. According to Pew Research, “29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020.”

Much of what we have been told over the past few years has turned out to be false. A recent Cleveland Clinic study found that more vaccine doses lead to a greater likelihood of getting COVID-19. Or a Cochrane analysis concluding that masks in the community made “little to no difference” in COVID-19 infections or deaths. Weren’t we told otherwise by authoritative doctors in white coats?

Someday there will be another public health emergency and it would behoove health authorities to set the record straight, either proving their assertions, or admitting they were wrong. Otherwise, they will have little future credibility, much like the boy who cried wolf.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer.