https://www.theohiopressnetwork.com/news/us/damar-hamlin-s-collapse-brings-vaccine-safety-front-and-center/article_74d5684a-9227-11ed-a53d-434834da9358.html"
Damar Hamlin’s collapse brings vaccine safety front and centerProminent local and national cardiologists, legal experts and medical professionals sound alarm bells on startling data tying COVID-19 shots to fabricated data, deadly harm
Lisa Murtha Jan 12, 2023
"He’s not the story. He’s the victim."
Those words,
written on Substack by Florida attorney Jeff Childers, perhaps best frame the biggest story of 2023 thus far — 24-year-old pro football player Damar Hamlin’s January 2 collapse from cardiac arrest at Cincinnati’s Paul Brown stadium.
Americans’ opinions about traditional medicine, media, pro sports and the COVID-19 shots all likely color their views on what exactly Damar Hamlin is a victim of. But with the University of Cincinnati Medical Center doctors still unwilling or unable to name the cause of Hamlin’s heart attack (and with no one confirming Hamlin’s COVID-19 vaccination status), this much is true: What happened last week has blown wide open the debate on whether or not COVID-19 vaccines are harmful and dumped it squarely in the laps of Ohioans, tens of thousands of whom witnessed the event firsthand.
By the grace of God and quick work of team and local medics, doctors and nurses, Hamlin is alive and making progress by the day, per both January 5 and January 9 press conferences with University of Cincinnati Medical Center Dr. William Knight IV, an emergency medicine specialist, and Dr. Timothy Pritts, a trauma surgeon. Notably, reporters have not been given access to any cardiologists who have treated Hamlin. Also, when asked about the cause of Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, Knight and Pritts said on January 5: “We do not have definitive answers at this time.”
After Hamlin’s transfer to a Buffalo hospital Monday, Knight noted that the UC medical team was “thrilled” about the pro football player’s improvement but added that “he still has a way to go” in terms of recovery. Both Knight and Pritts repeatedly declined to speculate on if or when Hamlin would fully recover.
Initially, in response to Hamlin’s event, many corporate media outlets elevated stories speculating about a cardiac event called Commotio cordis, a nearly one-in-a-million condition which generally affects teenaged men who’ve been struck in the chest with a ball, puck or other blunt object. When asked about Commotio cordis during a UC press conference, Knight noted it is a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning there are many other conditions that must be ruled out before they can consider it, and also exceptionally rare.
Neither Pritts nor Knight would answer questions about whether Hamlin had prior heart damage or whether or not a member of the UC medical team had administered an echocardiogram to Hamlin. No one asked whether pulmonary embolism (blood clot or clots in the lungs), which is also fully capable of causing cardiac arrest, was a factor. No one asked whether he was vaccinated for COVID-19.
In the absence of hard factual information on the cause of Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, traditional media outlets, including NBC News, the Washington Post, BBC News, Rolling Stone and even the Center for Countering Digital Hate, resorted to name-calling in an apparent attempt to silence debate; they assigned labels of “right-winger,” “parasite,” “anti-vaxx,” “grotesque,” “horrible” and “wildly irresponsible” to anyone who dared to bring the COVID-19 vaccinations into the discussion.
What’s tough to refute, though, is the dramatic rise in deaths among young people worldwide since the COVID-19 vaccines rolled out. As early as December 2021, a group of Danish researchers
published a study investigating the association between the COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis in people ages 12 and up. While they were careful to note that “the absolute rate of myocarditis or myopericarditis” after COVID-19 vaccination was low, their findings were alarming nonetheless. Of the 269 study participants who ended up developing post-vaccine myocarditis or myopericarditis, 40% were aged 12-39 and 73% were male. And in June 2022, prominent British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra published a 10,000 word paper on COVID-19 vaccines that revealed, among many other things, a rise in cardiac arrest cases amongst Israelis aged 16-39.
As time has gone on, researchers have noted as well that athletes seem particularly susceptible to both untimely death and cardiac arrest following injection of an mRNA vaccine. Case in point, a December 2022 study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology by Panagis Polykretis of the Italian National Research Council and U.S.-based internist, cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter A. McCullough, titled
Rational harm-benefit assessments by age group are required for continued COVID-19 vaccination, notes that from January 2021 to December 2022 — just under two years — 1,598 athletes suffered cardiac arrest and 1,001 of them died.
“Notably,” the study reads, “in a 38-year timespan (1966-2004), 1,101 athletes under the age of 35 died.” That number matches the number of athletes who have died since the COVID-19 vaccine became widely available in the U.S. The report concludes, “Since the end of 2021 and throughout 2022, young age excess mortality has substantially increased in many European countries in concert with the vaccine program.”
Right here in Ohio, in fact, Hamlin’s collapse is far from the first disturbing health incident concerning a young adult since the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine rollout began. Consider
19-year-old Simone Scott, a completely healthy Mason, Ohio native and Northwestern University student who suffered heart failure 15 days after receiving a COVID-19 shot; she went on to receive a heart transplant and ultimately died.
Or athlete and former Ohio State University ROTC member Greyson Fullmer, another 19-year-old Ohioan who had to drop out of school after suffering a remarkably similar heart-related response to Scott after his COVID-19 vaccination; he remained severely incapacitated and in constant pain for months, while doctors predicted it would take two years for a full recovery.
Or 21-year old University of Cincinnati pre-med student John Foley, who died one day after receiving a Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shot; Hamilton County Coroner Lakshmi Kode Sammarco later noted, “we don’t have any evidence to indicate that the vaccine was directly related to his death,” but is still awaiting the results of specialized tests and additional medical information. Or 13-year-old Cincinnatian Maddie DeGaray, who participated in the Pfizer clinical trials at age 12 and has been confined to use of a wheelchair and feeding tube ever since; DeGaray’s story has been covered by
Tucker Carlson of FOX News,
Jan Jekielek’s American Thought Leaders,
Realnotrare.com and
Lifefunder.com.
We are daily barraged by unexplained stories of catastrophic health events; as I write, WCPO.com tweeted out
this story on a Brown County, Ohio high schooler who just died unexpectedly, after a heart attack. Tens of thousands of stories are published on websites like realnotrare.com, sharing heartbreaking accounts of individuals’ life-altering injuries and newly developed chronic conditions that appeared post-COVID-19 vaccination and boosting. It’s not hard to see a pattern. It’s also no wonder that, just days prior to Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, Rasmussen Reports released data from
a national survey indicating 49% of Americans feel it’s likely that COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.
In short, though the vaccine safety debate may be new to some, for many, including a number of Ohioans, it’s been top of mind for years, and is now a life-or-death concern that’s been brought to the forefront by the mystery surrounding Hamlin’s unexplained cardiac arrest. For those willing to set emotion aside and critically examine available data, the mounting evidence against COVID-19 shots is more difficult to ignore by the day.
***
Akron attorney Warner Mendenhall was ready to “slow down” his work and spend more time with his wife, kids and grandkids when the pandemic hit in 2020. But after COVID-19 lockdowns began, the lawyer — whose career has focused on government overreach and corporate fraud under the
False Claims Act — felt called to defend individuals and businesses alike, including an Ohio mother who was charged criminally for violating quarantine when she took her son to school after an indirect COVID-19 exposure and a Buckeye State bar that lost its liquor license and was shut down after refusing to close during lockdowns.
Soon enough, he was suing Ohio school boards in places like Maumee and Hudson, on behalf of parents who wanted vaccine and mask mandates removed from their kids’ schools. On the college level, Mendenhall has been instrumental in the fight for removing both vaccination and testing requirements for Ohio students as well. Currently, he’s working on lawsuits against five universities in Ohio — University of Cincinnati, Ohio University, Bowling Green State University, Wright State University and Miami University — to stop both vaccination and testing mandates from ever happening again.
Warner Mendenhall
Warner Mendenhall
Genevieve Nisly Photography
“The problem is [the schools] claimed the power to institute these mandates on these students,” says Mendenhall, so “at any point they can reinstitute the power they claim to have.” For parents and college kids who felt threatened by the mandates and remain fearful they will return, the outcome of Mendenhall’s legal battles is critical.
Vaccine safety, however, is at the heart of one of Mendenhall’s largest COVID-19-related cases to date, not only size-wise at $3.6 trillion, but for its implications worldwide. The case involves
whistleblower Brook Jackson, who’s suing Pfizer and two of its subcontractors (ICON plc and Ventavia Research Group) for misleading the U.S. government and the American people about the COVID-19 vaccine and its trials.
If Mendenhall, who’s also currently consulting with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ legal team on a Florida grand jury probe of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, proves successful in the Texas/Pfizer lawsuit, he will begin unravelling every COVID-19 vaccine narrative that major drug companies, the federal government and corporate media outlets have pushed over the course of the past three years.
Jackson had been working alongside the developers of COVID-19 PCR tests when she took a job in 2020 overseeing Pfizer’s Phase 3 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trials in multiple Texas locations.
“Part of my responsibility was to ensure the rights, safety and welfare of the people volunteering to be in the study was protected, and that the information collected from each of them was supported by the highest data integrity standards,” writes Jackson on her personal webpage. “In the 20 years that I have been involved in clinical research, I have never seen a study conducted by an investigative site, managed by a contractor or overseen by a pharmaceutical sponsor that scared me, until then. What I documented and reported to my former employer and to Pfizer during an internal audit was dangerous and violated Federal law. I felt that I had a responsibility to make sure that the participants were protected and that the fraudulent data being collected in the study was not used in any safety and efficacy analysis. On September 25, 2020, I spoke to an agent at the FDA, and within hours, I was fired.”
In one lawsuit document (filed Jan. 8, 2021), Jackson, who was briefly employed by Ventavia (who in turn worked for Pfizer), alleges that “Ventavia’s trial protocol and regulatory violations were so widespread that [she] observed them on a near daily basis.” Taken in sum, her allegations detail a highly unprofessional study at best and a dangerous human ethics violation at worst.
Among the violations she claims occurred are: “fabrication and falsification of blood draw information, vital signs and other essential clinical trial data; enrollment and injection of ineligible clinical trial participants, including Ventavia employees’ family members; failure to maintain temperature control for the vaccine; failure to monitor patients after injection; use of unqualified and untrained personnel as vaccinators and laboratory personnel; ethical violations, such as failure to secure informed consent and giving patients unapproved compensation; over-diluting vaccine concentrate; failure to ensure trial site staff were properly trained; HIPAA violations…” — the list goes on.
Perhaps most disturbing is Jackson’s claim that, when she reported her concerns to Pfizer about the study after she was fired, “Pfizer elected to press on, expanding its trial to include even more participants.” In short, the summary notes the U.S. Department of Defense “has now purchased misbranded vaccines from Defendant Pfizer, relying on Defendants’ fraudulent misrepresentations that the vaccine trial was properly conducted.”
If permitted to move forward (Pfizer, Ventavia and ICON have filed a motion to dismiss), Jackson’s lawsuit will work to prove that Pfizer, Icon and Ventavia “fraudulently induced the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA] to grant Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by submitting fabricated, altered and compromised clinical trial data;” that Pfizer et al. “knew the data was flawed but used it in applying for and receiving the EUA” anyway; that Pfizer et al.’s “false certifications caused the FDA to issue an EUA under false pretense and caused the [U.S. Department of Defense] to pay for a product that was not subject to scientifically reliable testing;” and that “Ventavia retaliated against [Jackson] for exposing Ventavia’s wrongdoing” (i.e., the company fired her).
“Whether Pfizer was truthful to the FDA is of the utmost importance in a national emergency,” wrote Mendenhall in his own summary of the case. “Don’t the American people deserve to know if Pfizer lied?”
***
Pfizer COVID vaxx
Marcos del Mazo / Getty Images
If Jackson’s lawsuit succeeds and Mendenhall can prove Pfizer, Ventavia and ICON severely misled the U.S. government, many Americans’ trust in public-health medicine and belief in the safety of COVID-19 vaccines will be upended. An in-depth look at more data surrounding the shots does little to reassure.
Per this Reuter’s opinion piece written Dec. 20, 2022, the number of claims waiting to be processed by the U.S. Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (an eight-person government office which apparently processes “claims by people who allege they’ve been injured from the COVID-19 vaccine”) more than tripled — from 2,300 to 7,544 — between 2021 and 2022. Also noteworthy? “Prior to 2020 [the program] had decided fewer than 500 cases in its entire history.”
But the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s own data shows an altogether starker and more frightening picture. Per
this Epoch Times piece, there have been 1.34 million “reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID-19 vaccines, including 29,460 deaths and 243,266 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and July 8, 2022.” The reported events ranged from cardiac disorders, which comprised 20% of the deaths, to reports of miscarriage or premature birth, Bell ’s palsy, Guillain-Barre syndrome, anaphylaxis, myocardial infarction, blood-clotting disorders and a degenerative brain disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Crucial to note is that “historically, VAERS — the CDC’s self-reporting database from which these numbers come — has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events,” says the Epoch Times.
In 2020, a group of researchers decided to analyze the VAERS data and break out myocarditis cases by age.
The study’s results are shocking, given the continuing active campaign to vaccinate and boost kids, teens and young adults in the U.S.
In COVID-19 vaccine recipients who ended up developing myocarditis, “the median age was 21 years” and “males comprised 82% of the myocarditis cases for whom sex was reported.” In conclusion, the study authors noted, “Based on passive surveillance reporting in the U.S., the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men.”
Where facts and figures are concerned — especially regarding cardiac events which clearly comprise the majority of self-reported adverse reactions — cardiologists are best qualified to interpret the data. On December 16,
the Epoch Times excerpted one of McCullough’s Substack posts noting that “the risk for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS] is substantial, just after heart damage, as the highest risk cardiovascular side effect of COVID-19 vaccination.”
Last week, McCullough and his Substack writing partner, John Leake, wrote multiple posts regarding the Damar Hamlin incident and concluded that “If Damar Hamlin indeed took one of the COVID-19 vaccines, then subclinical vaccine-induced myocarditis must be considered in the differential diagnosis.” They also linked to
a 2021 study published in the European Heart Journal, which “describes the case of two high performance [rugby] athletes suffering a non-penetrating blunt chest trauma … due to a chronic sequela of myocarditis;” this research, they note, “provides additional grounds for considering Dr. McCullough’s initial assessment in Damar Hamlin’s case.”
The pair also wondered whether the full truth of doctors’ findings on what caused Hamlin’s cardiac event would ever be reported, given that “the NFL is a member of
the COVID-19 Community Corps”— a Biden administration and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program that transfers money to participating organizations in exchange for promoting COVID-19 vaccination among their members.” McCullough himself also wrote a fifth post, just Monday, about a recent study published in the European Journal of Pediatrics, showing that 17.1% of senior high school students reported cardiovascular symptoms after a second dose of an mRNA injection.
With no input from the cardiologists who actually treated Hamlin (the University of Cincinnati has pre-emptively warned all media outlets that the University of Cincinnati doctors who treated Hamlin will refuse all media interview requests moving forward), the Ohio Press Network (OPN) sought analysis from veteran Ohio cardiologist David J. Utlak.
Based in Canton, Utlak has been a practicing cardiologist for 40 years, having trained at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. From 1999-2000, Utlak served as president of the Ohio State Medical Association and was named “One of the Best Doctors in America” four times since 1995. He has given over 200 talks to pharmaceutical companies and served as an expert witness on more than 100 malpractice cases.
“The fact that somebody wouldn’t bring up the possibility of this young football player having myocarditis due to vaccine injury … it’s like we’re living in a dystopia,” notes Utlak. “As far as vaccines go, it usually takes five to 10 years to prove efficacy and safety. This [COVID-19 vaccine] was rushed to market. There’s lots of data that shows the danger of these in terms of cellular disruption and changes in cellular physiology and biochemistry” — a key beginning for potentially deadly diseases like autoimmune disorders and cancers.
Regarding the possibility of Commotio cordis in the case of someone like Damar Hamlin, Utlak notes that “hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a high risk condition with a thickening of a portion of the heart muscle, used to be the most common cause of cardiac sudden death in male athletes. That being said, the NFL definitely screens for that, so [Hamlin] did not have that problem.
“I don’t think the blow was commensurate with having Commotio cordis,” he adds. “It was not delivered in the way I’ve seen and read and learned about that particular syndrome.” In the end, Utlak notes, “You have to ask the question: Did this guy have some type of underlying myocarditis that, during exercise, would make his heart prone to have extra beats, which degenerates quickly into ventricular fibrillation? We must keep an open mind to the possibility that myocarditis in this case may be related to vaccination, depending on whether or not this player was vaccinated.”
Other cardiologists will likely have other opinions on what happened to Hamlin, of course, but given the facts as we know them today, it’s impossible to rule out the COVID-19 vaccines as a cause. In the end, the situation surrounding these mysterious vaccines is perhaps best described in Mendenhall’s Summary for the Brook Jackson case.
“In record time,” Mendenhall writes, “the COVID-19 vaccines have accumulated a higher number of reported deaths and adverse events greater than all cumulative adverse reports for any vaccine for the prior 30 years. Information revealed in FDA documents obtained via [the Freedom of Information Act] request show warning signals in Pfizer’s early data following the administration of the vaccine that by any reasonable measure would have halted the vaccine rollout in its tracks.”"
