This Essay Isn't About Damar Hamlin

Who gets to decide what you think?

All eyes have turned to the world of football after the dramatic collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin in Monday’s game with the Cincinnati Bengals. Details have been scarce, but it appears the 24-year-old player suffered a cardiac emergency after taking a shoulder to the chest. He was saved from instant death thanks to some heroically quick action by paramedics on the field. As of now, he remains sedated in critical condition but shows signs of improvement. Friends and fans near and far have rallied around Hamlin, a gentle, well-loved young man known for his openly devout Catholic faith. Hamlin’s teammates immediately took a knee in prayer for their friend before everyone mutually agreed to call the game off. People in the crowd were also filmed spontaneously praying the Lord’s Prayer. One ESPN correspondent even offered his own prayer live on air. As the football community awaits further updates, the sustained mood has been reverent, earnest, and deeply touching.

However, the media being what it is, I watched in real time as the first spark of Discourse was almost instantly lit, then swiftly became a forest fire. I’m speaking, of course, about That Discourse. You all know what I mean. I don’t even have to say it. And according to some people, I shouldn’t. I saw one woman say it in so many words: “If you’re thinking it, don’t say it.”

I kept scrolling, and as I was scrolling, I was thinking, Well. Do I or don’t I?

The much-replayed footage of the collision shows Hamlin at first getting back on his feet, then crumpling in a heap as his heart fails. It’s a brutal collision, to be sure, but to all appearances, it’s not too remarkable in the grand scheme of brutal football collisions. Doctors are still speculating about the cause, but many have suggested Hamlin suffered an exceptionally rare event called commotio cordis, triggered when the victim suffers blunt force trauma to the chest at precisely the right (or wrong) time in the cardiac cycle. It’s a window of seconds. Miss it, and cardiac arrest doesn’t occur. Rare? Yes. But rare things do happen.

Meanwhile, in one doctor’s professional medical opinion, the sort of people who would even bring up The Thing of Which We Do Not Speak, You Know, The Thing, “are terrible, horrible people.”

So likewise say the journalists at Vanity Fair, Salon, Yahoo, Daily Beast, and the Washington Post. And if all the journalists and all the doctors all agree, then who am I to disagree?

I won’t deny that some people have acted knee-jerkish, or perhaps just jerkish. Lots of the outrage has focused on Charlie Kirk, but I’d probably give Rogan O’Handley first prize in that category, for instantly tweeting out, “Welp, a lot of people are going to wake up to the truth tonight.” There’s a glibness, even a hint of gleefulness about reactions like these that understandably pisses people off. The same way people have said they are understandably pissed off when a relative dies suddenly and someone blurts out That Question at the funeral.

So yeah, I get it. To a point. The same way quite a few folks would get it who had to endure ugly speculation from the other side. And worse than speculation, the suggestion that people who opted out of one optional medical treatment should be demonized and discriminated against when it came to all kinds of life-saving care. Someone has helpfully compiled a retrospective thread here, in case people were hoping we would all forget that was a thing that happened.

But I digress. Here’s a tweet from David Bahnsen, who magnanimously suggests that not everyone thinking thoughts they aren’t supposed to think right now is “primarily immoral.” They’re “genuinely stupid,” mind you. And “corrupted.” But not “primarily immoral.” Just “stupid & corrupted,” he repeats for emphasis. Some of us are still trying to parse how you can be “corrupted” without being “immoral.” It was the thought that counted, I guess.

For the record, I don’t think David Bahnsen is “primarily immoral” to have tweeted out that we are all thinking, “A player getting hit in the chest and suffering cardiac arrest seconds later must have had a 14-month delayed response to the COVID vaccine.” Although I do think he is genuinely stupid. And ignorant. Stupid and ignorant.

Let me help David out, here. No, people are not wondering whether Damar Hamlin had “a 14-month delayed response” to the COVID vaccine. What they are wondering is whether Damar Hamlin could have suffered inflammation or stress around his heart in the aftermath of the vaccine, most likely one of the several boosters he’s likely had (though some have incorrectly assumed the NFL has a mandate, so let’s be factually scrupulous here and not take this as a 100% given). Like Windows updates, boosters are coming out seemingly every other month. So, the “14-month” number is completely random talk-talk. If the poor guy is vaccinated at all, we really have no clue when that happened last. It could have been months ago. It could have been ten days ago.

With that out of the way, the facts are that adverse cardiac reactions to the vaccine have varied in intensity, yet the significant prevalence of worryingly acute events in otherwise healthy young patients (especially men, but also women) has registered in serious medical research. As the vaccine first rolled out and research first came in, many governing authorities accordingly paused certain brands like Moderna, or were advised to limit administration for young people to one dose with no boosters. (See, e.g., Norway, Hong Kong, and the UK.)

Further, the long-term effects of vaccine-induced myocarditis and pericarditis are, as yet, unknown. A first bout of inflammation could gradually resolve itself, but could the heart be left more vulnerable as a result? More vulnerable to things that might not have triggered cardiac arrest in the normal course of events? Questions like this don’t seem stupid to me. Of course I’m not a doctor or a Daily Beast journalist or anything.

What happened to Damar Hamlin? At the end of the day, I don’t know, and neither do you. At the end of the day, this isn’t about Damar Hamlin. It’s about an unprecedented medical anomaly that is worth investigating. Worth serious research and uncensored discussion. Worth it for the sake of young men like Desh, a fit law enforcement worker who missed death by a whisker after an acute event triggered by what his own doctor definitively diagnosed as vaccine-induced myocarditis (more details here). Worth it for the sake of these dozens of young men and women in our armed forces who were coerced into taking something that should have been optional, and when they experienced problems after one dose, were waved off with an “If the first shot didn’t kill you, get the second one.”

Incidentally, anyone who cares to browse through the testimonials in that second link will notice that they are not limited to cardiac events. In fact, a variety of adverse reactions are represented, some cardiac, some neurological, some involving blood clots, and more—the full gamut. Taken as a whole, the collection shows patterns of substantial similarity with circumstantial variety. Indeed, that’s the descriptor I would apply to the sum total of all my own months of research around these questions, as I’ve sifted and compiled and compared the stories of men and women, old and young. Any good epistemologist, anyone worth his salt who is trained in the evaluation of evidence and testimony, could see it.

Of course, I’m aware of the memes that are inevitably whirred out whenever anyone points to a particular case, or cases. “Anecdotes aren’t data!” Or, where we don’t happen to have a doctor’s official seal on things, “Correlation doesn’t equal causation!” For a while, I bothered to try and have extended conversations with the sort of people who came into my mentions with these sorts of canned responses, sometimes accompanied by empty jeers of “anti-vaxxer!” or “conspiracist!”

Then I simply stopped, because it became clear that it was pointless, and because I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. I don’t give a damn about politics. I don’t give a damn about Donald fricking Trump, or Charlie fricking Kirk, or whoever the frick the Discourse is supposed to be about right now. I give a damn about people. Normal, ordinary people, ordinary conservatives and liberals and centrists and I-don’t-even-know-or-care-what. Little kids and young moms and earnest millennial “Trust the Science”-bros and middle-aged lesbians and, and, and. People. People who loved life one day and woke up the next day just begging somebody, anybody, to tell them what the hell happened. If they did wake up.

And yeah, incidentally, I also care about Damar Hamlin. I don’t know his case well enough to make definite conclusions. I’ll remember him in prayer regardless. But in the meantime, whatever I think, I’ll be damned if I apologize to Medicine, Inc. or Journalism, Inc. for thinking the Wrong Thing. Because Medicine, Inc. and Journalism, Inc. do not get to tell me or you what to think. Because nobody does.