Five fold increase in Cardiac deaths of FIFA athletes | Hacker News Reader

Five fold increase in Cardiac deaths of FIFA athletes

stephenc.substack.com

49 pointsroody1551 comments

This story seems to originate from a single anti-vax source in Israel. I can't find any independent confirmation.

shouldnt be to hard to verify the sudden deaths of celebrity athletes..

Not celebrities, but likely junk all the same

The source has no verification for those high numbers. What is has are tons of links to facebook posts and other anecdotes.

There aren't any deaths of celebrity footballers in 2021.

From the list the article uses, only 2 players who died in 2021 have wiki pages, and neither played for a significant club.

In previous years the number of death of players with their own wiki pages is similar.

Yeah, while we shouldn't dismiss it completely we should wait for more resources to report the same data.

Yes, we should ignore it until we have trusted independent verification. It would be impossible for us to assess the credibility or accuracy without a third party that I trust and hopefully agree with.

Or spend 5 minutes and review the anti-vax mess. It spells out it's agenda in the opening paragraphs.

Past that, it isn't a focus on FIFA but globs together tons of posts about anyone who plays sports, eg: school-age leagues.

Interesting that your first post was attacking the source as being antivax and casting doubt about the substance of the article because there was no independent verification but the second half of your second post was able to credibly comment on the substance of the article without relying on third party verification.

Lead with the second post next time.

>Interesting that your first post was attacking the source as being antivax

So visit the source. It's antivax focus is confirmed by reading the opening paragraph or by visiting the homepage.

> casting doubt about the substance of the article because there was no independent verification

180 FIFA athletes dropping dead would get worldwide attention. If that were to ever happen, we'd have tons of verification.

> but the second half of your second post was able to credibly comment on the substance of the article

Yep. It credibly commented that the substance of the article was sewn together from SM posts and anecdotes of hospitalized individuals who happened to sport - and who have nothing to do with FIFA.

Most importantly, all of it together doesn't add up to the claimed numbers.

Yes, great post. These are all good substantive comments on the article which are far superior in quality to your first post which, at its core, was a post saying “this guy is antivax don’t trust him!”

Try to post more like this without having to have someone draw your substance out first.

Or, you know, reallocate some snark time into actually reading the Israeli antivax source for yourself.

I guess everyone has bias and then hops onto their media of choice yet media is manipulated for profit trash (i.e. https://www.axios.com/steele-dossier-discredited-media-corre...). Whatever your choice of media outlet you follow you are more inclined to embrace what they are saying as 100% fact/truth. Also point to science they are pushing yet this is new science and only time will tell the true science and story as you see years later with that article I linked. It's shows how the media spun whatever they wanted for their bias agenda and will always/continue to do so especially when greed/money/power is in the aim.

From someone who believes nothing seen on any for profit media and believes in science but only years and years of science! Not what any for profit media machine is saying or the science they are pushing cause we are all learning as we go .. it's fluid yet time (years) is the bellweather!

I would agree you shouldn't believe an anti-vax source without years and years of science to back up their claims.

There are a bunch of numbers on that article. Does anyone have a list of names that those numbers represent? I think if we can check major news sources for these names, it would be pretty easy to debunk the article.

How is nobody mentioning COVID? It is well known to cause clotting issues. Many of these athletes may have caught it and felt little in the way of symptoms but still suffered from clotting issues that showed up when they exercised.

they're playing the long game - making you make the connection and feel smart and smug about yourself. It's all in the game

i think you are correct sir.

You're right, I believe they want the reader to connect it to myocarditis after vaccination. But once again that happens at much higher rate with covid itself.

"To find out how many deaths actually occurred during the last two decades among FIFA players (2001-2020), we used Wikipedia - "List of association footballers who died while playing". To know how many cases occurred in 2021, we used the list collected by us in "Real-Time News" (which includes the cases noted in Wikipedia for 2021)."

There are cases that didn't make it to wikipedia (14 for 2021). The graph there is just not accurate to what is in Wikipedia e.g. more one listed in 2018.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_football...

That said the cases are elevated in 2021

The source article that the OP is based on doesn't provide the numbers that the OP claims it does.

Could this be from the Covid layoff? That is, if you don't play for a year, and then you start back up and try to play at that level, you might be more likely to have a cardiac failure.

I'm asking, because I don't know. Did FIFA lay off for a while due to Covid? If so, how long?

I've reached the point where if I see "substack.com" in the URL I'll automatically assume it's propaganda bullshit. Can't imagine that was their goal when they launched it, but sadly that's where they've ended up.

Interesting - It definitely feels to have captured the journalist-in-exhile group in a way that medium didn’t

Can't handle discussion and evidence opposing your worldview?

That's the mark of a weak mind.

If only we could shut down all contrary evidence to the expert consensus. That would totally lead to a better world.

The truth is really the opposite. Diversity of opinion, contrary arguments, and unusual new ideas are the engine of progress.

This article, and Substack in general, is a great example of how true progress is made. It could be wrong, maybe even it likely is wrong if it contradicts the consensus, but damn the consensus! This is not a safe space where we only discuss approved ideas! The point of research is to find flaws in the consensus. How is that possible if contrary ideas can never be discussed?

Think like a scientist! And have the decency to allow others to form their own opinion rather than forcing one on them.

Think: What has been gained by censorship versus what has been lost?

You are simply on the wrong side of history if you don't enthusiastically support free discussion, especially for the ideas that are marginalized. The better policy is affirmative action for disfavored ideas.

Many leagues were stopped for weeks/months due to covid and then resumed. Wondering how this relatively long period of inactivity affected players' health.

Also: some leagues finished their season later than usual and the rest before the consecutive season was lower than usual, i.e.: 3 months of no playing and then suddenly more intensive game schedule than ever.

I wouldn't expect elite athletes to stop working out just because games weren't being played - they did expect to be on the field again at some point and would've retained their fitness.

There's so much motivated reasoning in this thread to avoid an obvious conclusion.

> obvious conclusion

Which is Covid?

No, myocarditis brought on by experimental vaccines.

Aside from extremely rare cases, young, healthy people get over covid quickly and easily. Professional athletes are amongst the healthiest in the population.

Alas, this story had been memory-holed quickly because the evidence is inconvenient.

If it is like cycling then lock-down was good opportunity to dope. Maybe someone went too hard.

People are connecting this with COVID and/or its vaccines, but in 2020 we saw a 90% reduction in out-of-competition doping controls. This was followed by statistically significant spikes in athlete performances once competitions had restarted. I would look into that rather than the COVID link.

In cycling we saw nearly Armstrong are performances.

The likely implied thought here is that it would be linked to the Covid vaccines. However, I believe the most likely explanation is provided by this citation:

> To find out how many deaths actually occurred during the last two decades among FIFA players (2001-2020), we used Wikipedia - "List of association footballers who died while playing". To know how many cases occurred in 2021, we used the list collected by us in "Real-Time News" (which includes the cases noted in Wikipedia for 2021).

There is an obvious sampling bias, and they likely collected much more cases for 2021 than for other years. Looking at mortality statistics by cause at nation level would be much more rigorous.

Is it possible to determine by comparing to an unvaccinated control group or is vaccination a requirement for play?

This paper shows the problem with interrupted time series analyses.

Mainly, (1) there is an external shock that happened in 2020 that interrupts the historical trend in the data. This shock is probably the covid pandemic, but the time series can't really disentangle how covid impacts death rates (i.e., is it the vaccine? Is it an undiagnosed infection? Is it putting off care because hospitals are full? Is it stress? Is it something else?). In other words, interrupted time series don't really isolate the effect beyond the general shock.

(2) It is possible that a similar pattern is present in a different subpopulation that hasn't experienced the same shock. Unfortunately, I cannot think of anyone that hasn't experienced in some way or another the covid pandemic that the authors can use as a possible counterfactual for these analyses. Without that, the interrupted time series could just be an example of an omitted variable that correlated with both the external shock and the outcome and that it is the actual "root cause" of the outcome. For example, it could be that covid lead athletes practice less and become more sedentary. When they resumed their training regimens in the second half of 2020, they were out of shape leading to heart problems. I'm not a heart disease researcher so I don't know if this happens, but it could be.

https://twitter.com/YaffaRaz/status/1460311564855218188

Take a look at the author's twitter feed. Without being able to read (hebrew?) they're clearly an antivaxer. This piece doesn't mention covid or vaccines, but its implied.

Reading around it seems like the data is not correct. At a minimum the headline says 100 people died but later on there's nothing, not even their own chart, to support that claim. I would treat this as extremely biased. Flaggin'

> Reading around it seems like the data is not correct. At a minimum the headline says 100 people died but later on there's nothing, not even their own chart, to support that claim.

This is exactly true.

Is it possibly an unaccounted for side effect of the vaccine?

It's exactly the demographic that's known to have elevated risk of myocardial problems due to the vaccine.

While I'm no expert, just a bit of Googling leads to suggestions that it's also the demographic showing a high (and therefore arguably much higher) incidence of heart inflammation after infection (e.g. from the American College of Cardiology recently):

https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2021/09/28...

Note while no deaths were found in the studies, the fact that these small studies are finding inflammation common suggests the effect is much larger than the (very unusual) cases being intensively surveilled in the case of inoculation. (I.e. you find what you're looking for...)

That's only true if the populations are not being controlled for prior infection.

Much more likely side-effects of COVID infection, no?

Likely not:

"Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

Well if you have two groups, 100% of whom got the vaccine, versus 0.25% or whatever who got Covid, then sure that's not unlikely. But in a few years, 100% of those who don't get the vaccine will get covid. So this isn't exactly a rational basis for making decisions.

I don't believe the study is comparing absolute numbers, it's talking about risk on a per-individual level.

I didn't read the study, but the article talks about the number of cases during a four month period.

That's about how long the Pfizer-BioNTech reliably prevents infection in that cohort.

Considering that the link is an anti-vaxxer, probably bias.

Seems like we should check for COVID and it’s aftermath. Could sedentary lifestyle, lung damage, or the vaccine be related?

i dont know that athletes have a sedentary lifestyle.

They could, but FIFA athletes are among the least sedentary people on the planet, so it's not related to this.

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