Conspiracy Theorists Said People Who Got the COVID Vaccine Would Be Dropping Like Flies. That Hasn’t Remotely Happened

Conspiracy theorists have for years now insisted that COVID-19 vaccines were the real killers, especially among young men — but a new study shows that there's no data to back that up.

Published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the new study conducted by the Oregon Health Authority's public health division used data from June 2021 through December 2022 to investigate whether there was any actual link between COVID vaccines and cardiac deaths in young men, which conspiracists have relentlessly claimed are linked.

Looking at death data from that time period in the state of Oregon, the OHA identified only three cases out of nearly 1,300 young men aged 16-30 who'd had mRNA vaccines within 100 days of their untimely passages. Of those, two had had underlying illnesses that resulted in their deaths, while the cause of death for the last person had remained undetermined.

While these findings would seem to pretty conclusively put to bed vaccine misinformation campaigns claiming that the jab causes cardiac arrests in otherwise healthy young men — as was the case when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamilton collapsed on the field in early 2023 due to such a rare heart event — it's hard to say whether it will put a dent in any conspiracy theories, which tend to operate in an emotional realm beyond concrete data and evidence.

All the same, however, the researchers behind the study felt they had to try.

"When Damar Hamlin went down, immediately comments were getting made that it was possibly vaccine-related," Dr. Paul Cieslak, the OHA's medical director of communicable diseases and immunizations and a study coauthor, told NBC. "This is kind of what we were trying to address with this analysis."

As Cieslak noted, 30 people in the same age range in the state died from COVID itself during the same time frame that the study was looking into, the majority of whom were unvaccinated.

"When you’re balancing risks and benefits," the doctor said, "you have to look at that and go, 'You got to bet on the vaccine.'"

According to Dr. Leslie Cooper, the chair of the Mayo Clinic's cardiology department who was not involved in the study, the 100-day post-vaccine window was actually "quite generous."

"They went above and beyond to try and capture any possible cardiac death from vaccinations," he told NBC.

Because such events are quite rare in people under the age of 35 and generally are considered to occur due to genetic factors, looking into any potential links between mRNA vaccines and cardiac deaths in young men does indeed seem worthwhile — especially given that there has been demonstrated a minor link between the vaccines and myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart.

All the same, the data clearly shows that among the substantial sample population in Oregon, COVID vaccines did not kill them.

"Their conclusions are quite reasonable," Cooper said.

More on health conspiracies: Joe Rogan's Idiotic New Theory: AIDS Is Caused by Poppers