We're going to start today with died suddenly. What does that mean? Someone died suddenly has become the new code for the COVID vaccine is killing people.

Now this has all come to an extremely stupid crescendo because of what happened with the collapse and cardiac arrest of NFL football player,

Damar Hamlin on the field during an NFL game, a little over a week ago. And as you know, if you've been watching this program because we've been we've been following it,

I even got some voicemails about it that I played for you. The gist of the story is that Damar Hamlin collapsed,

not because he got hit in a particular way, but because of the COVID vaccine, the COVID vaccine, which by the way, nobody knew whether Damar Hamlin had actually received at the time that people started saying the vaccine is to blame.

And this brings us to a bigger story that has been building the died suddenly conspiracy theory is the idea that people who have received the COVID-19 vaccine are either dying at an unusual rate.

The story is always otherwise healthy people are suddenly dying for unexplained reasons. That's one piece of it. Or experiencing health effects of different different kinds.

Now, there is a lot that we could say about this and so many different things. There's even a film called died suddenly, which rehashes a lot of these same debunked claims.

But a lot of this has to do with some really basic logical fallacies that I hope I've done an okay job of educating people about over the years on the show.

And it also has to do with something called the base rate bias. So there's really two things going on here. First of all, it's a fundamental issue of correlation versus cost causation.

We sometimes call this post hoc or go proctor hoc, meaning it happened afterwards. Therefore, it happened because of or to put it another way.

B happened after a therefore a must have caused B. And when you zoom out, you very quickly see how faulty this sort of thinking is. So let's start tight and then we'll zoom out. Let's start with the Mar Hamlin.

Are there examples of cardiac arrest during sporting events among athletes? Yeah, there are.

You know, in major sports, Detroit lion Chuck Hughes had a fatal heart attack on the field in 1971. That's the only NFL player to die while playing.

Danish soccer player Christian Erickson suffered cardiac arrest during the tournament in 2021.

Hockey Hall of Famer Chris prongers heart stopped when he was hit in the chest by a hockey puck.

NHL player J Boomester or Boundmester, I'm not exactly sure on the pronunciation, collapsed on the bench after a cardiac episode.

Mark Vivien foe died during the 2003 semifinal match from an undiagnosed heart condition. That was a soccer death.

All of these have not have not been claimed to have anything to do with vaccines. Most of them predate the COVID vaccines.

So the the Mar Hamlin situation is not unique, but that's not really the big story. The big story is you have to understand base rates.

When you test a vaccine as was done by Pfizer and Moderna before the COVID vaccines were fully released to the public.

A lot of these studies clinical trials had 40,000 adults, for example, 40,000 adults.

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