A recent study of deaths in U.S. students appears to show a declining rate of sudden cardiac deaths. The study included students who were registered with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which organises intercollegiate athletics. Figure 1 shows the main findings. However, there are a number of points about this paper which raise doubts about the findings.
The authors had access to data from the following databases:
- NCAA resolutions list
- Parent Heart Watch database
- Prospective media report searches
- NCAA insurance claims
- National Centre for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research database
In the five years from 2004-2008 there were 55 deaths and nine cardiac deaths per year.
Over the 10 years from 2003/4 to 2011/12 there were on average 53 student deaths per year. The NCAA has a database of deaths but the only years publicly available are 2016, 2022 and 2023, which show the following:
- 2016: 71 students and 191 staff deaths
- 2022: 70 students and 231 staff deaths
- 2023: 68+ students and 285+ staff deaths
An honest scientist with access to these data would surely want to investigate the 50% rise in mortality between 2016 and 2023 among staff, but this was ignored. In fact, anyone wanting to understand the impact of Covid vaccines on sudden cardiac deaths would need a much bigger dataset. Epidemiologist Tracy Beth Høeg points out that, assuming vaccine uptake of 85%, this study was examining only 255,000 males, which is far too small to see an increase in mortality of between one in a million and one in 333,000, meaning we would expect zero to one deaths in a study this size.
It is odd that 2016 is the only historical year still available. Was it an outlier? Where are the other years?
As to 2022 and 2023, why were student deaths so much higher than in the preceding years – around 70 compared to a historical average of 53? Have they just got better at recording the deaths? Were there more students registered? The authors are not clear on how many students were enrolled in each year and their characteristics. This is crucial as including more females and more athletes in low risk sports will skew the data. The overall trend downwards (see chart above) seemed to be to do with increasing numbers of females and low-risk sports being included as the rates for male basketball players remained high throughout the period.
Of the cardiac deaths, there were eight due to myocarditis over the whole period with only one post 2020. What is not clear is whether an athlete who received a diagnosis of myocarditis and had to end his or her athletic career as a result would still have been included in the NCAA database if he or she later died.
Tracy Beth Høeg also points out that the small rise in non-cardiac deaths among these athletes was not even commented on by the authors.
While it is encouraging that there was not a loud signal of harm among these U.S. athletes, the small dataset used means it cannot be used to dismiss concerns based on numerous much larger datasets.
Conflicts of Interest?
Virtually no scientific studies are completed these days that do not in some way link directly or indirectly to pharmaceutical funding. I was interested therefore to see this stated boldly on the final page of the paper: “Sources of Funding: None.”
Wow. A completely unbiased piece of scientific research! Amazing!
Or maybe not.
When one takes more than a cursory glance, the ‘Acknowledgements’ and ‘Disclosures’ sections directly above and below the ‘Funding’ section tell a slightly different story (emphasis added).
Disclosures
Dr. Ackerman is a consultant for Abbott, Boston Scientific, Bristol Myers Squibb, Daiichi Sankyo, Invitae, Medtronic, Tenaya Therapeutics, Thryv Therapeutics, and UpToDate. Dr. Ackerman and Mayo Clinic are involved in an equity/royalty relationship with AliveCor, Anumana, ARMGO Pharma, and Pfizer. None of these entities was involved in this study.
Dr. Baggish has received funding from the National Institute of Health/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Football Players Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine to study cardiovascular outcomes among elite athletes and receives compensation for his role as team cardiologist from the U.S. Olympic Committee/U.S. Olympic Training Centres, U.S. Soccer, and U.S. Rowing.
Dr. Drezner has received funding from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, the American Heart Association, and the National Centre for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research.
Dr. Harmon has received funding from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, Football Research, Inc, the Pac-12, and the American Heart Association.
Dr. Kucera is supported by funds from the National Centre for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research.
Acknowledgments
This research is supported, in part, by the National Centre for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research is supported by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the National Federation of State High School Associations, the American Football Coaches Association, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine. Conclusions drawn from or recommendations based on the data provided by the National Centre for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Centre for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research or any of the supporters. The authors thank the Parent Heart Watch and National Collegiate Athletic Association for data collection and Kyle Conley for work on this study.
By way of translation, ‘supported’ here means ‘receives money from’. Which essentially means ‘is funded by’. This is a deeply dishonest trick to give the illusion that the paper suffers no conflict of interest bias. We would pretend to be shocked, but as we know by now, this is de rigueur for The Science™. What is also well-known is that if Ackerman, Drezner & co. don’t find exactly what their ‘supporters’ want them to find, that ‘support’ may find itself evaporating overnight. Careers don’t tend to get a mega-boost from crossing Big Pharma.
The ‘Acknowledgements’ section is particularly compelling reading. If you were an institution involved in the mandating of these jabs as a condition of entry or continuing membership, you might be a tiny bit motivated to find ‘scientific’ evidence to prove that this vaccine mandate had not caused harm, particularly if, as is hypothesised, the harm was in some cases a fatal heart attack in a formerly young, super-fit individual. Nothing here is new, nothing here is surprising. But it continues to be our duty at HART to point out the dishonesty that is being promulgated as ‘science’ to try and prop up the increasingly fantastical idea that these injections were safe and effective.
Dr. Clare Craig is a diagnostic pathologist and Co-Chair of the HART group, which first published this article. She is the author of Expired – Covid the untold story.
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its nothing to do with scariants – its all about vaccine coercion…
and it would be rude to wheel out the ‘boosters’ before everyone has been given the initial experimental gene therapy – and you will need the boosters to have your digital medical IDs updated – and receive your social points…. stay safe
Thank you for your clear presentation of the data & eloquent diagnosis of the sorry state in which we now live.
Yes, brilliant! Why can’t more people see this?
I find the hospitalisation of younger people a puzzle. Has the virus really changed its target population? Maybe, I suppose.
But an alternative explanation might be that there is a nod and a wink policy in operation whereby the NHS and the medical profession are conspiring to feed in as many hospital cases as possible. So, anyone with any sort of risk factor is now being hospitalised whereas six months they would have been told to stay at home and use ventolin, or whatever.
Another explanation of course might be that we are seeing the effects of vaccination, and that these younger people are now becoming vulnerable to the virus because of vaccination (give we know vaccination weakens the immune system for a couple of weeks).
Hospitalisation has fallen dramatically in the younger (<54) age groups as well, just a bit less relative to the older age groups. Overall mortality is much more seasonal in the older age groups, and a lot of that seasonal overall mortality is driven by respiratory infections, so the observed shift in the proportions of the (now far smaller) number of deaths in each age group is not too much of a surprise.
for “deaths” in the above read “hospitalisations”
Younger people who needed treatment for other serious conditions were also sidelined for the covid obsession.
It is also explained by considering the Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEETs). These are people who hve been at their parents’ homes for a large part of the lockdown, not having anywhere to go out to. And then the pubs opened and larger groups could gather, and Bob’s your uncle, all these unvaccinated and formerly isolated people meet up, hang out and share their infections around.
If you look at more nuanced age related statistic the highest infection group is 19 to 25. NEETs are 16 to 24.
Agreed, they WANT admissions to be high since there are so few deaths (and not just “from covid”, overall deaths have tanked for weeks)
Are we going to get less propaganda and more real news from GB News which begins this evening.
I live in hope, but will probably be disappointed
I hope too, they are more experienced reporters unlike the programmed ones we have now.
With Tom Harwood on the staff, I have very low expectations – I hope they are low enough that I will not be too disappointed!
The immediate signs are not promising, with BBC, ITV, and Sky apparently trying to throttle their news output by refusing GBN access to pooled news resources. We can all see what’s likely to happen next – access to the pooled facilities will be dependent on GBN agreeing not to rock the boat.
Seriously doubt it. Fully onboard with Covid forever I reckon.
Can I refer you to the NHS website and cancer treatment waiting time breaches from April 20 -21
thats 159310 thousand cases who were not treated within the basic NHS parametres, and most common failures are in Breast Cancer and Gyny Cancers, Way to go Boris you dont see those figures pasted up every day do you
Good post, thanks.
Now what was that Boris was saying the other day, something about society becoming more feminine? You need live females for that, not dead ones.
Anecdotally a friend said she knows an oncologist who specialises in breast cancer. He’s been twiddling his thumbs for the past 14 months. Like you say factor this into you stats fat man.
There can be no doubt, no doubt at all – that is a deliberate part of the whole scam.
If it is a scam then who is behind it? It could be the government, or it could be SAGE, big pharma, Bill Gates etc. (take your pick), and Boris and co. are too spineless/scared/stupid to stand up yo them.
A very good piece.
Welcome to our club.
This piece is vaccine propaganda, pure and simple.
I thought it was reaffirmation of the constant barrage of lies that we have been subjected to over the past 18 months. If it is propaganda to get me to be injected with an untested drug then it has failed miserably.
If it is propaganda to get me to be injected with an untested drug then it has failed miserably.
Yes it’s propaganda and I am glad it’s not working on you. Most doctors are so brainwashed concerning vaccines that it could even be unintentional, but still unlikely.
Looking at my down vote score I must congratulate 77th Brigade for working on Sundays, without pay I hope.
I think you miswrote your first posting which is why people down-voted you. Your second posting about doctors being brainwashed concerning vaccines implies you agreed with the article.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/face-third-wave-covid-19-die-may-already-have-cast/
The DT’s resident zero Covid advocate and vaccine pusher stirs up the readership to ask for more restrictions for longer….
My take on this is the following:
The share of the unvaccinated being infrcted is higher because the criteria have been changed for the vaccinated only, we are as a result now comparing apples to pears here and miss the vast part of infections amongst the vaxxed.
The vaccines have created the variants, mass vaccination is a huge mistake, the focus should always have been and be on treatment and prophylaxe and on focused protection.
Testing is useless, certainly as long as tests aren’t standardized.
Face masks and SD are not just useless but harmful torture, and the only thing needed to catch the asymptomatically infected (if transmission by them really exists, which is still highly doubtful contrary to the author’s claim and much more likely at the vaxxed now) temperature measurement, which is of course not done anymore but worked just fine last summer.
No test, no mask, no gene therapy for me, thanks. I’d rather get infected deliberately with the delta or any other variant.
Obesity is the driving factor for serious outcomes, not not being vaccinated, see swprs.org latest.
https://swprs.org/obesity-and-the-pandemic-new-insights/
And the absolute risk of death is still tiny and hardly reduced by the vaccines anyway- see all data and trial results.
If you are under the age of 70 and reasonable healthy, your risk of dying from the virus is as high as dying of any other cause unexpectedly, see Prof. Luckhaus, Germany’s top mathematician.
https://politikstube.com/professor-dr-stephan-luckhaus-zu-seinem-austritt-aus-der-leopoldina/
Stop the fearmongering and get a life!
Paul Nuki: purveyor of shite masquerading as science
Re the comment on obesity, I can’t help remembering that when BoJo was a patient on account of his alleged infection (I’ll set aside the issue as to whether it was true or not), someone released his body mass index; not good – albeit a good advert for whatever tailor he uses!
We all know Boris is a buffoon and a Liar. Neither of those precludes him from doing a good job as Prime Minister. His overarching character flawthough is that he is a COWARD.
Recent months? They were tossed away last March along with everything else we knew about medicine.
“A lot more dangerous than any virus”
Indeed. I think many of us reached that conclusion well over a year ago.
On hospital admissions : as a frequent visitor, it is obvious to me that hospitals are now opening up and trying to cope with the back-log generated by their politically-driven desk-jockeys. Activity has increased immensely compared with a year ago.
This will push up general admissions significantly, and, of course, in parallel,a rising number will be labelled ‘Covid admissions’ on the basis of false PCR-detected debris
The government`s Net Zero madness is going to require either coercion or psychology to implement, and Covid has given them some useful clues…
I attempted to post the following on order-order this morning and free speech was naturally prevented.
If anyone finds this too offensive well do let me know:
Its very easy.
Look at ourworldindata and compare the Vindaflu ‘cases’ in India with the UK.
Then move the line for the UK forward to match the Indian graph and you can see we are where they were back in April, 4 weeks before Vindaflu proved to be a damp squib, I mean peaked.
That’s where the experts are hoping we’ll be in 4 weeks time at the peak of the Vindaflu wave and then it’d obviously be impossible to relax anything and we would in fact need harsher lockdowns – as they’ve been so effective so far.
Obviously this does require you to ignore:
a. The two massive spikes (which we had and India didn’t) as that will mean a lot of people have natural immunity to Vindaflu and the highly profitable experimental prophylactic treatment and any positive effects it may have.
b. The naughty Indians have half a hospital bed/1000 people (UK 2/1000 last 2017 data) generally poor healthcare and sanitation yet have done surprisingly well by using WHO banned treatments like Ivermectin.
c. That Ponzi schemes exist and supposedly smart people keep falling for them.
No idea why this would be censored in a country of free speech
These days it is difficult to find a country of free speech. Do you know of any?
To continue Project Fear the govt issued to following propaganda poster
If anything starts with the word “Government”, don’t waste your time reading it!
Brave words, correct data. Having been a statistician and modeler for business years ago I have tracked the data relentlessly. I agree Covid is deadly, to a narrow corridor of people. I agree long Covid exists, as it does with seasonal flu and other viral diseases (reminder, one symptom that puts you in this category is depression…enough said).
But words like “exponential growth” are pure fear mongering. Yes we went from 2k to 4K, but we did not go to 16k this time. Or 256k. If they wants to use 3k as the baseline we would have to have 9k new cases.
We have bee surge testing in hotspot communities. Beyond the fact this is driven by the overstated fear of asymptomatic infections, it makes sample comparison. If you reduce testing elsewhere and test a hotspot you cannot compare last week’s 3k to this week’s 7k. I appreciate the work of Tim Spector, and I agree cases have gone up. In hotspots. In Oxford we had 13 positives yesterday. Our local trust has 3 Covid patients. 3 of the 1089 patients. Or .6% of capacity.
It is past time for this government to provide firm data and firm targets for the ending of masks, social distancing and the rest. If it is cases, they must justify why these pose a threat when the numbers are small and have had a small increase (.55 to .60 of capacity). Tell us on Boris what data (not date) will you base your decision on. We deserve that after 15 months of your abuse of our natural rights!
Safe means never!
Why surge test the bees, and for what?
Of course, they’ve manipulated the meaning of safety and risk, and the accuracy and tolerance of any tools in use, largely to promote their own position.
Awkward from the BBC “And of 42 deaths in people with Delta variant infections, 23 were unvaccinated and seven had received only one dose. The other 12 had received two doses more than two weeks before.”
19 vaccinated deaths and 23 unvaccinated. Not that much in it.
Welcome aboard !
LONDON
Mon, 14 June, 12 noon till late
Downing St, London
MONDAY https://gab.com/emoji/1f511.svghttps://gab.com/emoji/1f510.svghttps://gab.com/emoji/1f513.svghttps://gab.com/emoji/1f929.svg
JUNE 14TH , BE THERE
1O DOWNING STREET
12 PM
EXERCISE YOUR RIGHT TO PEACEFULLY GATHER.
All the acceptance of authoritarianism … Seems to me that the CCP has more control over the west than our leaders would have us believe, will the white elephant aircraft carriers stop the soft engagement with useful idiots like Blair and help us get our freedom back?
Methinks not.
Perhaps what we are seeing is fulfilment of Lord Acton’s dictum: “Power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”
As a chum of mine said to me – “Even Hitler didn’t mange to close Britain’s pubs.” It’s some power to be able to do that.
Blooming well said sir!
Absolutely fabulous piece.
A perfect summation, thank you very much. I’ve forwarded it to my MP. I know he’ll be able to do nothing; he’s a newbie MP and thus will only do what he’s told. But it will embarrass the servile plonker when I keep on reminding him of his craven attitude on a regular basis – up until he loses his seat on the gravy train at the next election. Hopefully.
Good idea, and I will forward it my (completely useless) MP, who ALWAYS, in spite of being (because?) in the CRG votes FOR the government every single time. My contempt for:
Politicians, Civil Servants, quangocrats
Bishops, a large number of the clergy
the BBC, most national newspapers
is boundless.
Your comment about the smoking technique is half way there. The theory of wearing ‘face coverings’ is supposedly to reduce risk to third parties. They are absolutely useless to the wearer, most of the time in this context (not writing about proper industrial masks etc). A minor tweak might be: A café man is happy to exhale known toxic compounds to the general public.
The last two sentences are spot on, though.
It was never about Covid or public health,it was always about getting as many people as possible jabbed. We can only speculate as to what will happen as a result but it won’t be good.
Wow! What a great article. Many thanks for that.
This piece is a cracker, which I have forwarded to both my Twitter and Facebook pages.
The key bit that resonated with me was this:
Generally speaking, I’m an adherent to the ‘cock-up’ school of disaster rationalisation – but the last few months have changed my mind.
That’s just it. Even the most conspiracy averse of us – in which I include myself – are now being forced by events to conclude that there is indeed “something rotten” going on.
I guess that Power corrupts, and…
Julian Jessop (retired doctor)
Couldn’t agree more. What has really bothered me during this whole episode is the total refusal of government and the DoH in particular to engage with real scientists and clinicians. When clinical medicine is determined by statisticians, epidemiologists, public health doctors, physicists etc it is a betrayal of medicine. Like the writer I am a retired NHS consultant, one who actually has experience of managing the syndrome that causes Covid-19 – the cytokine storm. I have read the definitive textbook on the subject. I have offered my help and advice. I have had no acknowledgement and, indeed, as the Sceptics website reported a while back, it is apparent that any communications from outside the system were simply binned. So it’s not only not medicine, it’s not even science.
Do I detect some difficulty on the author’s part in keeping one’s temper? Yes I do. I am in the same boat!
Thank you for making an effort.
It is very obvious that they do not want ‘outsiders’ to their narrative being involved, or to participate in sharing better or good practice – or even consider that there is an alternative viewpoint.
Can I ask why you and others such as the author of this piece have not taken and are not taking this up with the GMC and the Royal Colleges? Complaints from persons such as you would be treated with far more seriousness than those from the general public. It seems to me that if individuals such as Michie or Vallance thought they might be at risk of striking off/expulsion for misconduct they might start withdrawing their objections to lifting lockdown.
A great article.
My only argument is with graph 3 which is what the doomsters use to show that it’s more dangerous for the young. This would be better using actual numbers rather than percentages to show the decline across the older age groups with little (if any) change for the younger groups.
Really excellent article that poses all the key questions. First time I have commented here in well over a year of being registered with the site. Thank the writer!
“or why vaccinated people are prevented from foreign travel,” Why can’t those unvaccinated travel surely if you had the jab and are “protected” you don’t need to worry about other people’s medical history? And if the “vaccine” doesn’t work then it doesn’t matter whether you’re “vaccinated” or not ! It all totally illogical.