Fear and Falsehoods Fill the Premier League’s Vaccination Gap
The New York Times
Only 84 percent of players in Europe’s top soccer league have taken the coronavirus vaccine. Persuading the rest has been harder than anyone imagined.
The report spread like wildfire. Premier League players shared the link among their peers. Some passed it to their family members and closest confidantes. A handful were sufficiently troubled by what it seemed to suggest that they presented it to their clubs’ in-house medical teams, seeking advice.
It had been produced by a website that says it tracks the number of “young athletes who had major medical issues in 2021 after receiving one or more Covid vaccines.” The report claimed to list 19 “athletes” — mostly in the United States — who it said had experienced heart attacks after being inoculated. Some of the attacks, the site noted ominously, had been fatal.
Almost immediately, the doctors and others spotted the glaring flaws in the research. One of the examples cited was Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player, who had died in January. He was 86. Another name on the list, a former N.B.A. player, had been 64. The most cursory research showed that many of the younger athletes, too, had documented, underlying conditions.
