With Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin in critical condition after suffering a cardiac arrest, guess what two different radio personalities, Charlie Kirk and Dr. Drew, decided to do perhaps separately. Did they mention how the blow to the chest that Hamlin suffered during the Bills’ televised Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals could have led to the player’s cardiac arrest? Did they mention the different possible causes of cardiac arrest? Did they mention how unusual such a situation was, so unusual that the National Football League (NFL) ended up postponing the game as thousands of people watched stunned? Not exactly.

Kirk, who is the founder and President of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, that’s been supporting Donald Trump, tweeted, “This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.” And Dr. Drew, the media personality whose full name is Drew Pinsky, MD, posted the following on Twitter: “So disturbing. Another athlete who dropped suddenly.” All too familiar? Another athlete who dropped suddenly? Where’s the data supporting the claim that athletes “dropping suddenly” have become a common occurrence? What the heck were both of them talking about?

Well, it seemed like a bunch of people on Twitter knew exactly what Kirk and Pinsky were talking about in their tweets. For example, look at the following trail of responses that Pinsky’s tweet elicited:

As you can see, Katrine Wallace, PhD, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, School of Public Health, told Pinksy, “It’s not too late to delete this tweet.” Comedian and author Jolenta Greenberg tweet-responded, “Stop insinuating such horrible misinformation.” Tyler Black, MD, an emergency psychiatrist, admonished, “You know exactly what you're doing here, and it's despicable.” And baseball writer Keith Law asked, “Are you really trying to exploit a tragedy like this?”

Neither Kirk nor Pinsky explicitly mentioned Covid-19 vaccines in their tweets. Ah, but many on Twitter suspected that this pair was actually echoing the talking points that the film Died Suddenly has been pushing. In fact, Stew Peters, the former bounty hunter turned radio host who was behind this film, tweeted the following: “Dozens of athletes in high school, college and minor leagues around the world have collapsed and #DiedSuddendly on the field of play. Now THIS, on national television with 10 million people watching. Don’t let them gaslight you. This is NOT normal.” Yep, Peters used the hashtag #DiedSuddenly, which in all likelihood was referring to his Died Suddenly film. After all, it’s not every day that you see this hashtag used in a different context, unless it’s something like: “Molten lava chocolate cake just appeared on my lap #DiedSuddenly.”

This Died Suddenly film wasn’t exactly chocolate cake. Instead, it was more like a chicken stew of film clips and sound bites that were taken out of context, mixed with various conspiracy theories, and seasoned with a lot of B.S. And in this case, B.S. didn’t stand for Bachelor of Science. The film pushed claims that many people have, guess what, died suddenly after getting Covid-19 vaccines. However, such claims weren’t supported by, wait for it, wait for it, much scientific evidence at all, as I have detailed in my coverage for Forbes. When it came to facts, the film was like a gigolo on a go-kart, playing fast and loose with them. For example, the film alluded to the fact that more deaths have occurred over the past two years than in previous years. Yet, it didn’t bother mentioning the possibility that a little thing called the Covid-19 pandemic could have been responsible for most of those excess deaths.

Similarly, Peters didn’t offer much scientific evidence to back his tweet about Hamlin’s condition. Neither did the numerous other social media accounts, many of which are anonymous, that more blatantly claimed that the Covid-19 vaccine was to blame for Hamlin’s collapse on the field in Cincinnati. Caroline Orr Bueno, PhD, a behavioral scientist who is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland, collected a collage of the cacophony of such Covid-19 vaccine tweet claims on Twitter:

And then there was the recent episode of the FOX News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” hosted by Tucker Carlson. Carlson, whom John Oliver has called a “superspreader” of Covid-19 vaccine fears and doubts as I’ve reported for Forbes, mentioned of all possible things, surprise, surprise, Covid-19 vaccines. Then he brought on to the show not two, not three, but just a single medical doctor. And not just any medical doctor but specifically Peter McCullough, MD, who has pushed the use of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 during the pandemic despite the lack of scientific evidence and has been described by Jessica McDonald writing for FactCheck.org as “a cardiologist known for spreading misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines.” McCullough went right to talking about Covid-19 vaccination as a possible cause without really fully addressing other possible causes like commotio cordis. He didn’t even mention the fact that Covid-19 may be a lot more likely to cause myocarditis or other heart problems than Covid-19 vaccination.

Unless all of these folks making claims that Covid-19 vaccination was somehow involved in Hamlin’s collapse were invisible or really, really tiny, they weren’t on the field when the medical team was delivering chest compressions and defibrillation shocks to Hamlin in efforts to get his heart rhythm started again. So how could they have possibly known what really happened to Hamlin?

Until information emerges from the medical doctors who have actually been taking care of Hamlin at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, everyone else can only speculate what happened to the 24-year old Bills player. There’s still a wide range of possibilities. Hamlin, whom the Bills had drafted out of the University of Pittsburgh in 2020, could have had, for example, some kind of undiagnosed cardiomyopathy or other cardiac condition that could have pre-disposed him to a life-threatening arrhythmia. And no, the NFL can’t be 100% perfect in screening for such conditions as McCullough had suggested. As any medical doctor should know, no test is 100% accurate. One possibility that many cardiologists have mentioned is commotio cordis, which isn’t a pair of words you hear every day. Because it doesn’t happen every day. Chances are your doctor has never told you, “Oh, looks like you’ve had a little commotio cordis. No worries. Nothing that watching a little Tucker Carlson won’t cure.”

Commotio cordis is a chance yet very serious event that can occur even in perfectly healthy individuals. It happens when a blow to your chest ends up perturbing the electrical system in your heart. Normally, electrical signals flow through your heart muscles in a typical progression that prompts the different chambers of your heart to squeeze and then relax in a coordinated manner. There is a brief 40-millisecond window during each of these cycles when your ventricles are relaxing and your heart’s electrical system is particularly vulnerable to trauma. If your chest gets hit right at this moment by say a fist, a foot, a helmet, or a hard ball, it could prompt an abnormal electrical burst in your heart. This can send the electrical signals in your heart out of whack to the point that you suffer a cardiac arrest. It’s kind of like Fonzie hitting the jukebox at just the right place to turn it on in the TV series Happy Days.

This is a very rare event with approximately 10 to 20 reported cases each year, according to a publication in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology. The vast majority of victims have been male, and the sport where commotio cordis most frequently happens is baseball. Typically, it’s when a baseball hits your left chest wall, which is right over the left ventricle of your heart. That’s why pitchers, catchers, and batters have been more susceptible to commotio cordis than, say, someone who hangs in the outfield.

Those stricken by commotio cordis have on average been 15 years of age with only a few here and there being over 20 years old. This may be due in part to the stiffening of your chest wall with age. It may also have to do with the fact that fewer males play with balls after age 20. Balls used for sports, that is. However, just because Hamlin is a little over 20, at 24 years of age, doesn’t mean that commotio cordis can’t happen to him.

Now, it’s not completely clear whether the male preponderance has been due to more males engaging in contact sports historically. If you haven’t noticed, many females do tend to have some differences from males in the structures of their chests. And males and females do differ in the incidence of other arrhythmic conditions such as long-QT syndrome and Brugada syndrome.

It remains to be seen whether it was commotio cordis or some other heart condition that led to Hamlin’s currently critical condition. Right now, the hope is that Hamlin will be able to recover from this life-threatening situation. Currently, it’s not clear what his prognosis may be. One thing that’s clear, though, is that every time there’s a higher profile case of a life threatening condition these days, it seems like only a matter of time before anti-vaxxers start trying to blame the condition on Covid-19 vaccines. Advancing such a theory about Hamlin without any real evidence is pretty darn low. But you never know how low anti-vaxxers may go to try to further their agenda.

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