Explained: Why anti-COVID vaccine rhetoric is on rise after American football star’s sudden collapse on field

Anti-vaxxers are having a field day following footballer Damar Hamlin’s collapse during a game. Today I received this message from a former NFL player So many current & former players are scared of what this vax is doing to their friends & they’re not allowed to discuss it publicly I promised him I would be his voice But my God what is happening to us This is horrible pic.twitter.com/wdACjugxwz — DC_Draino January 4, 2023 “Everybody knows what happened to Damar Hamlin because it’s happened to too many athletes around the world since COVID vaccination was required in sports,” former Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson tweeted. Promoting anti-vaccination sentiments, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on Twitter: “Before the covid vaccines we didn’t see athletes dropping dead on the playing field like we do now… Time to investigate the covid vaccines.” The verified Twitter handle of the documentary Died Suddenly, which was released in November last year, also commented on Hamlin’s collapse, claiming such incidents involving athletes were rare before 2021. As per Rolling Stone, Cannon also asserted that myocarditis does not cause cardiac arrest, adding that “it’s massively more common for people who have COVID than for people who have the COVID vaccine.” Experts told CNN and NBC News that Hamlin’s collapse could have occurred from commotio cordis. — Khalid Aljabri, MD د.خالد الجبري January 3, 2023 Jeanine Guidry, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who researches health misinformation and vaccine hesitancy, said that for people trying to find faults with COVID vaccines, Hamlin’s sudden collapse worked to justify their beliefs.