screengrab from Buffalo Bills YouTube inteview
Last night, during "Monday Night Football," something awful happened. Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, 24 years old, made a tackle, and then collapsed as the result of a severe and seemingly sudden cardiac event. He's in critical condition. The game was suspended and then postponed, though there was a time last night when the ambulance was on the field when it was still unclear that would happen.
There are many doctors on Twitter, and though they are not Damar Hamlin's doctor, some have offered that what happened looks like it could be something called "Commotio cordis," a rare arrhythmia that can happen after a blow to the chest. It apparently happens most often with baseball or hockey players who are young. (Think of a very fast baseball or puck hitting the chest.) There are other possibilities. We will find out when we find out.
What not one real medical expert has suggested is that Damar Hamlin collapsed because he was vaccinated against COVID-19. However, America's vilest and stupidest people are committed
to a conspiracy theory that people are just collapsing and/or dropping dead everywhere because of the vaccine, despite how they have no actual evidence of anyone collapsing/dropping dead from the vaccine. So they're pretty sure that's what happened. They're particularly obsessed with fostering a fantasy that young, healthy professional athletes are dying in droves from mandatory vaccines.
It's sick. These people are sick.
Here's a sampling. Some of them think they are very cleverly speaking in code, but you'll let us know if you're confused what they mean, OK?
Garbage. Just absolute garbage.
We have a theory why these people are so committed to this conspiracy theory, and it's that many of the low-information (mostly) white people spreading it are unvaxxed people who have lost unvaxxed family members and other loved ones to COVID. When so many of us were getting vaccinated and COVID started transitioning away from a daily fear and into a daily annoyance, these people and their families were still becoming gravely ill and dying tragic, lonely, pointless deaths. They're ashamed to admit it. Humans really hate to suffer the humiliation of admitting they were wrong, and we imagine that tendency is only stronger if their mother or their father or their brother or their sister is dead because of it.
So they invent fantastical worlds where their loved ones died of something else, and The Liberals are out there just dropping like flies, because they took the vaccine.
"Coach" Dave Daubenmire has been a prolific and batshit spreader of anti-vax conspiracy theories, and he's been in overdrive the past 12 hours. An example:
Read that and read the rest of the posts from the senile old white Boomer goat, but then
read the comments from the everyday lunatics who follow him. Read them in light of our theory. Read them in light of the number of preventable, unvaccinated deaths that have happened in the last two years. Read them in light of the fact that the American people are being little bit lazy about keeping their vaccinations current.
And of course, read them in light of the fact that these fucking pigs are willing to take very real tragedies and use them to bolster their delusional fantasies. As with other unhinged rightwing conspiracy theories, the lies detract from very real issues and the very real grownups trying to solve them. (For instance, the way QAnon obsessions with saving imaginary children from imaginary trafficking hurt actual child trafficking victims and derail real child trafficking investigations.)
You know, in case you thought we were being sympathetic. We aren't.
Fuck them.
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