The full-contact sport of football is one that is rife with risks. The public and the players have for some time known the dangers posed to the brain by the forceful blows to the head that occur during regular gameplay, leading first to concussions and then commonly and devastatingly to conditions like chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Yet every part of the body is at risk in such a physically violent sport, including the heart, a fact that was made agonizingly evident Monday night as Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered an apparent cardiac arrest after a relatively routine tackle in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals and then collapsed on the field. He was administered CPR and a defibrillator treatment and then rushed to the hospital.
It’s not altogether clear exactly what happened, though some medical professionals have speculated Hamlin suffered a relatively rare condition known as commotio cordis, caused by a blow to the chest at a critical moment in the cardiac cycle. The uncertainty is natural in an evolving medical situation, yet that hasn’t stopped unscrupulous conspiracists from exploiting this painful event for their own nauseating agenda.
Dimwits like perennially wrong right-wing operative Charlie Kirk hadn’t even waited for Hamlin to be taken off the field before they began spinning yarns about the supposed culpability of the COVID vaccine, without any evidence and before even the paramedics on the scene could ascertain definitively what was happening. In their zeal to be reflexively contrarian for political gain and profit, these cretins will latch onto anything to insinuate that the life-saving vaccines are sinister or even deadly, pitting their know-nothing word against that of countless medical professionals and researchers.
The thing they always glide over is that no one wants us to take ineffective and dangerous treatments, and in fact we have whole regulatory agencies dedicated to ensuring that; yet the vaccines have been exhaustively tested and studied, and saved many millions of lives worldwide. Some more would be saved if these agitators would drop their reprehensible act.
