Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin makes a tackle, gets up, and immediately falls down. Every commentator immediately declares that Hamlin’s medical emergency is due to “commotio cordis.” Or so it seems. Any discussion of the possibility of the COVID vaccine’s involvement is “lies.”
I serve as a medical information resource to an Orlando political talk show called “The American Adversaries.” So, when this very public medical event happened, I became Chris Hart’s on-air guest. His co-host is Mike McBath, a former Detroit Lions player who is still actively involved in player issues. While doing my homework, I found lots of doctors making diagnoses. It did not matter whether the vocalist was in the front or the back row, he was singing in unison with the choir. This raises a serious question for these doctors. “Didn’t your medical school make you take a class on ‘differential diagnosis’?”
Let me ‘splain this for you. If you have high blood pressure, your doctor should do a good history, an examination, and some tests before he decides on the proper treatment for your blood pressure. Do you have:
- Morbid obesity
- Family history of hypertension
- Periodic sweating and fast heartbeat
- Or (many more)?
The point of all this is to make certain that the doctor is tackling the actual problem causing the high blood pressure. If he doesn’t, you’ll get a treatment that, at best, won’t help and, at worst, might be dangerous. Most of us are familiar with this in the epidemic of diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Lots of bright kids are getting (mal)treated with medications when their only problem is that they’re bored in school. The proper treatment for them is more challenging school work, not medications.
Just as hypertension and bored kids need proper diagnoses, the Damar Hamlin incident cries out for the same. And all those doctors making armchair diagnoses should slow down until they see all of Hamlin’s chart. In particular, they should stop claiming that anyone who implicates the clot shot is spreading misinformation. I haven’t seen Hamlin’s chart, so I can’t say for certain what caused his cardiac arrest, but I can be responsible and explain what may have happened. Notice that I said “may,” not “did.”
There are at least four possibilities that must be in the differential for Hamlin’s arrest.
1. Commotio cordis
2. Sudden death following COVID vaccination
3. Adrenaline-induced lethal arrhythmia following chronic COVID vaccination-induced myocarditis
4. Chronic underlying structural or electrophysiological cardiac pathology manifesting at that moment.
It’s crucially important to understand that those four don’t include all the “rare birds” listed by Dr. McCullough. Further, all of them would look exactly the same during the seconds from contact to collapse. All of them would stop his heart from pumping at the same moment. From the time his heart stopped until he passed out would be on the order of ten to fifteen seconds. That’s simply because your brain and body haven’t used up the oxygen the bloodstream already delivered.
Anyone who has watched a hunting show knows that an elk or moose can run hundreds of yards before collapsing, even after its heart has been destroyed by the bullet.
Ditto for Damar Hamlin. He made the tackle, stood up, and fell over when his brain and muscles exhausted the oxygen they already had.
We can wipe one of those choices off the list right away. Top-line professional athletes get really serious cardiac exams before their team signs the final contract. So, Hamlin is virtually certain no to have had any big-time anatomic or electrical problems with his heart before he joined the Buffalo Bills.
Commotio cordis (Latin for “commotion of the heart”) happens when a small dense object impacts the sternum (breast bone), creating an electrical impulse at exactly the wrong moment in the cardiac cycle. This “R on T” phenomenon puts the heart into ventricular fibrillation, a rhythm that doesn’t pump any blood. This is the “diagnosis” being shouted everywhere in the internet. But nobody claiming “This is it!” has a clue. There just isn’t any public medical data on Hamlin’s event. All we have is the Monday Night Football video and a clock.
Commotio cordis is most common in teenagers, whose chest walls are more flexible than adults. But even there, it’s rare, with only twenty or so cases in the US each year. Common missiles are softballs, hockey pucks, and similar small items. They strike the sternum, in the center of the chest, very close to the heart.
In Hamlin’s case, a frame-by-frame inspection of the event shows that the runner’s right shoulder pad struck Hamlin on the right side of his chest. This pad is designed to reduce impact forces, so it’s very unlikely that it would have generated any appreciable shock.
In fact, multiple knowledgeable observers, including Mike McBath, have commented that there was nothing unusual about the tackle. Hamlin was throwing the runner to Hamlin’s left as the runner tried to escape around Hamlin’s right. The runner’s helmet never impacted Hamlin’s chest.
This doesn’t mean that commotio cordis has been completely ruled out. It just makes it much less likely. And there are two other possibilities we must consider. The first is that Hamlin was in that short window for myocarditis and sudden death after the mRNA COVID shot. With no information to confirm this, we must put that in the “question mark” box.
A closely related possibility is chronic myocarditis from the COVID shot. This creates a susceptibility to adrenaline, leading to bad heart rhythms. In fact, it appears that all sudden death incidents, both after COVID and COVID shots, are directly due to surges of adrenaline.
Once again, Mike McBath confirms that during a game, at the moment of intense activity like making a tackle, personal adrenaline peaks. If Hamlin had this sort of subclinical chronic injury from the mRNA shot, the moment of the tackle could easily have set off a lethal event.
The events after Hamlin’s collapse also point us to the “vaccine,” which we know he had taken because he is not one of the two Bills who did not get the full original course. He was defibrillated very quickly, and this should have been able to convert him to a stable rhythm. But it took nine minutes to get a stable heart rhythm re-established. This suggests more serious underlying pathology, as we’d expect with a vaccine injury.
The careful reader will notice that I have not said, “Hamlin’s injury is due to xxx.” I just don’t have that information. The multitude of commentators voting for commotio cordis could be right.
But the information we have lines up better with a vaccine injury. Finally, I do not have high hopes for complete recovery. A nine-minute resuscitation is likely to lead to severe brain injury from lack of oxygen. But his early recovery of language function does point toward a better outcome than most.
The NFL should mandate that all its players and staff be examined for vaccine-induced cardiac injury. It would be a great service to them and to America.
Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. His DoctorTed podcasts are available on many podcast channels.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Thank you for a thoughtful examination of the data and a call for medical questions, rather than group/mob consensus to trying to eliminate the possibility of the untested vaccination being the culprit.
If your heart is STOPPED, even briefly, I can tell you from personal experience, YOU KNOW. And when that happens, the last thing you would want to do is JUMP to your feet. You are immediately taken by fear. And you will want to lie down. And BTW, a cardiac event is often excruciating. My personal experience says the event most likely happened after he stood up.
Great article and great post.
Now, expect the Fake Medicine echo chamber to cancel you and revoke your license to practice medicine for this heresy.
So the safe and effective stuff causes a fragile heart and with exertion at a high level of competition what could go wrong?
safe and effective stuff causes a fragile heart and with exertion at a high level of competition what could go wrong?
I’d never heard of this football player before but I knew there were a very few that resisted the ‘shot made mandatory’ (as have I). A friend told me of the event and I was sure then, as now, the answer lies in irresponsible medical behavior without basic analysis of a manufactured hoax.
Thank you doctor for reminding doctors they are investigators, too. Please act like it.
Eleven months ago, intense pain, a black big toe with the bottom rotting away and a CT showing 10cm of total blockage of a femoral artery necessitated a bypass operation with several follow-up blood flow appointments, one requiring a balloon expansion and overnight stay in hospital. After all that, nobody has asked me if I got vaccinated or not. Never. What happened to curiosity? Where is the gathering of real life evidence?
Anecdotal evidence has weight if piled high enough.
I’ve lost two good friends less than a month after their shots. I don’t know a single soul killed by Covid.
Something is VERY wrong!! It needs to be righted!
So sorry to hear what happened to you. I applaud you for speaking out. The whole world knows what is going on with the jabs and these doctors who continue to act ignorant are slapping us all in the face, including the maimed and the dead. They are bribing the injured and the families of the dead to keep their mouths shut, which makes those who take the bribe instead of speaking out and Saving Lives, culpable in this horror.
Kind of hard to trust doctors after the events of 2020 to now and ongoing.
Like the first commenter I know two people (men in their 60s) that dropped dead shortly after being vaccinated. I know one 30 year-old that got such bad myocarditis after hit first injection that his pro-vax doctor told him not to get the second. I know one 19 year-old man that had a brain bleed ten days after vaccination and will be in his parents’ care for the rest of his/their lives. I know two others seriously injured post-vax. But I don’t know a single person that died or was injured by covid. Why are governments still telling everyone get vaxxed and/or boosted??? The world has gone completely mad.
Great job, thanks for speaking the truth!