Eighteen-year-old Bronny James, the son of Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James, is in the hospital Tuesday after collapsing and going into cardiac arrest during basketball practice with the University of Southern California (USC) basketball team on Monday.
ESPN provided the following statement from the family,
“Yesterday while practicing Bronny James suffered a cardiac arrest,” a James family spokesperson said in a statement. “Medical staff was able to treat Bronny and take him to the hospital. He is now in stable condition and no longer in ICU. We ask for respect and privacy for the James family and we will update media when there is more information.
“LeBron and Savannah wish to publicly send their deepest thanks and appreciation to the USC medical and athletic staff for their incredible work and dedication to the safety of their athletes.”
The medical reasons why a teenage athlete went into cardiac arrest were not disclosed.
The mainstream media carefully tiptoed around the accident. CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta argued such cardiac arrests among the athletes were “rare,” and could be caused by various undiagnosed structural abnormalities of the heart.
“We know a few thousand people who are young athletes do suffer sudden cardiac arrests every year,” Gupta said.
The correspondent failed to provide the source of his claims.
According to the study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2017, the incidence of cardiac arrests among people aged 12 to 45 participating in competitive sports was nowhere near “few thousands” between 2009 and 2014. In fact, there were … sixteen.
Per the study,
“Over the course of 18.5 million person-years of observation, 74 sudden cardiac arrests occurred during participation in a sport; of these, 16 occurred during competitive sports and 58 occurred during noncompetitive sports.”
If Gupta is correct and Bronny James was one of those unfortunate athletes whose heart condition was not timely diagnosed, then the sheer rate of such incidences warrants a full-blown official investigation into the matter.
Twitter users promptly pointed to the elephant in the room: Covid vaccines, known to be connected with myocarditis and pericarditis, were the most probable cause of Bronny’s cardiac arrests.
One of the high-profile figures bringing up Covid shots was Elon Musk.
“We cannot ascribe everything to the vaccine, but, by the same token, we cannot ascribe nothing,” he wrote in response to popular Twitter personality ChiefNerd, who became famous for posting content criticizing and challenging the official Covid narrative and policies. Musk added, “Myocarditis is a known side-effect. The only question is whether it is rare or common.
While algorithms “added context” that “risk of myocarditis is significantly higher after an actual Covid infection than with the vaccine,” there are at least 13 studies suggesting otherwise.
Bronny’s vaccination status remains to be verified. While LeBron James confirmed in 2021 that he decided to get vaccinated since the decision “best suited” not only to him, but also to his family and friends, it is unclear if his entire family followed suit.
According to the CBS News, LeBron James said,
“I think everyone has [their] own choice — to do what they feel is right for themselves and their family and things of that nature,” he said. “I know that I was very (skeptical) about it all but after doing my research. I felt like it was best suited for not only me but for my family and my friends.”
The ambiguous phrasing of the statement might imply two things. First, the basketball superstar, like so many Americans, took the vaccine because he was motivated to protect his family and his friends from the potential infection. It does not necessarily mean that all his family and friends did. Or he meant that the vaccination was something that his family and friend agreed was the “best suited” solution for all of them.
However, another indication that Covid vaccine might have played a role is the vaccination mandate in USC — the college Bronny announced he was committed to in early May — that was put in place in 2021 and not lifted until May 19, 2023.
The rate of cardiac arrests and sudden deaths that coincided with Covid vaccine mandates in 2021 is nothing short of unprecedented, as discussed by former Wall Street insider Edward Dowd and famed soccer player and commentator Matt LeTissier in their interviews with The New American.
