Are young, vaccinated athletes 'dropping like flies'?

It's theoretically possible the vaccines are causing cardiac events among athletes. But the evidence so far is beyond shoddy.

Between 2014 and 2018, a total of 617 athletes affiliated with FIFA - the international soccer federation - died from sudden cardiac death while playing soccer, or within an hour of soccer-related activities. That's an average of about 125 athlete deaths per year. They were, on average, 34 years old.

During that same time period, another 142 FIFA-affiliated athletes collapsed for cardiac-related reasons while playing soccer, but survived.

This data was all captured in a rigorous study, published in 2020.

Over the past few months, vaccine skeptics have been compiling terrifying lists and video clips of young athletes who have collapsed while playing sports since the vaccines began to be rolled out. This is presented as proof that the vaccines are causing mass cardiac deaths.

I admit, there's something intensely visceral about video montages of 20-something, super-fit athletes suddenly clutching their chests and collapsing, or lying deathly still on the pitch, while medical personnel swarm around them. That's not right, our gut tells us. That just doesn't happen. Twenty-something athletes don't just drop dead from heart attacks.

Except, they do. A lot more often than our gut leads us to believe. Among athletes playing a single sport, belonging to a single professional organization, 125 deaths per year, pre-Covid. Multiply that across all sports, and include middle and high school athletes, retired athletes, pick-up athletes, and suddenly the numbers are startlingly large.

It's true that most of us will never personally know a young, healthy athlete who has suddenly dropped dead while playing sports. In that sense, it is a very "rare" event, and our gut isn't wrong to say, "this just doesn't happen."

The problem, however, is that our gut is only designed to make snap judgements about statistical likelihoods involving the sorts of numbers that we encounter in day-to-day life (i.e. in the dozens, or perhaps hundreds). There are, however, almost 8 billion people on earth. About half of those are under 40. A significant percentage of those play sports at some point, whether it be during gym class, or in a minor league.

So, how many of these hundreds of millions, if not billions of athletes die per year of sudden cardiac death? The fact is, our gut has literally nothing to say about that. The only way to figure out the truth is to do careful data gathering and statistical analysis.

That, unfortunately, is precisely what the vaccine skeptics are not doing. Instead, they are scanning global newspapers, noting every anecdote involving any athlete, including everyone from elementary school to retirees in their 60s, regardless of whether they are (or could have been) vaccinated, and then taking it for granted that this proves a vaccine-induced, mass-casualty event. It does not.

First, let me be clear: It is theoretically possible that there is a statistically significant increase in cardiac events among athletes in 2021. It is also theoretically possible that if there is an increase, the vaccines are a contributing factor. Indeed, given what we know about the link between vaccines and myocarditis, particularly in young males, it would be irresponsible and unscientific to dismiss this hypothesis out of hand. Clearly, this is an urgent question that needs to be examined in depth by responsible scientists.

The problem, however, is that we don't actually know whether there has been an increase of cardiac events in the first place (FIFA says they have no data suggesting an increase, although their statement is admittedly hardly conclusive), let alone whether the vaccines are causing it. Even if there were an increase (and again, there is no proof that there is), other confounding factors must be taken into account, e.g. Covid itself, or disruptions in lifestyle and training regimes over the past two years. For this reason, it is irresponsible and unscientific to collect anecdotes, and then to proclaim that those anecdotes "prove" something that they do not.

Take, for instance, this awful article from America's Frontline Doctors, proclaiming that there is a "five-fold increase" in sudden cardiac and unexplained athlete deaths in 2021. The article relied upon a "study" put out by an Israeli blog. That "study" identified 21 cases of sudden cardiac death among FIFA-affiliated athletes in 2021, from news reports. They then compared this number to (and it boggles the mind) a Wikipedia list of FIFA athletes who died while playing soccer, which lists on average 4.2 deaths per year. This is how they calculate their "five-fold" increase.

This is, to put it charitably, a joke. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, there is a real study of sudden cardiac death among FIFA athletes, which showed about 125 deaths per year. The Wikipedia list of athlete deaths is woefully incomplete, probably because it only lists the most prominent athletes who died. Vaccine skeptics are very impressed by their painstakingly gathered lists of dead or collapsed athletes. However, none of their lists show that there has been an increase in these kinds of incidents over the base rate in previous years. All they have succeeded in showing is that athletes sometimes collapse on the field, and sometimes die.

Adding to the shoddiness of the effort, is that many of the athletes listed on these lists of collapsing or deceased athletes weren't even vaccinated in the first place. Many of them couldn't have been, because at the time they died or suffered a cardiac event, the vaccines hadn't even been rolled out in their countries for their age groups.

Take Wigan Athletic player Charlie Wyke. After he collapsed on the pitch, it went viral that he had recently been vaccinated. He later put out a statement clarifying that he had not yet received any vaccine. Then there's Danish soccer star Christian Erickson, whose collapse was similarly blamed on the vaccine. Again, he hadn't been vaccinated.

Or take Lyons player Martin Terrier, who recently collapsed. I have no idea if he was vaccinated. But interestingly, he also collapsed on the field in January of 2020 - long before the vaccines existed. Because people - a whole lot of them - have been fainting, collapsing, and dying of heart attacks long before the Covid vaccines. The impulse to blame every new incident on the vaccines must be resisted as a clear case of the availability heuristic.

So, what should we learn from this? Firstly, that we should take vaccine-skeptical Internet sleuths with a giant grain of salt. I saw one such would-be statistician post the other day that he had found "the strongest evidence you can imagine" that the vaccines were killing large numbers of people. He then presented a raft of data from the CDC's website, which looked - I admit it - terrifying. Shortly thereafter, he posted an apology. He had completely misunderstood how the data set worked.

That is, in my experience, par for the course in the weird and wild vaccine-skeptical social media ecosystem. If these incidents of collapsing athletes are in any way related to the vaccine, it is going to take rigorous analysis by scientists who do not have an axe to grind to figure that out.

Secondly, death can come for any of us at any time. Just because you are a star 25-year-old athlete, does not mean that you will live to see tomorrow. Long before Covid came around, or before the Covid vaccines were a twinkling in the eye of President Trump, young, super-fit athletes were dying suddenly on the playing field. That could be any of us, at any moment. So, vaccinated or unvaccinated, live every day like it's your last.