A new study out of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dispels a popular coronavirus-related conspiracy theory that’s been popular among right-wingers.
For a while now, anti-vaxxers have pointed to highly publicized incidents of people — particularly, young people — suffering cardiac arrest and concluded that their conditions must have been caused by the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine. Several Fox News hosts, for example, tried to blame the vaccine for LeBron James Jr.’s suffering a cardiac arrest last summer. And prominent right-wing conspiracy theorists waged a similar disinformation campaign around Damar Hamlin, a player for the Buffalo Bills who suffered cardiac arrest during a game in January 2023.
The CDC conducted tests over multiple years that disprove a link between mRNA vaccines and cardiac arrest. The study looked at more than 1,000 death certificates of young people who died of heart conditions or of unknown causes from June 2021 to December 2022, a period in which nearly 1 million young people got vaccinated.








