To conjecture is to be human: Reactions to the Damar Hamlin drama

By Kent R. Kroeger (January 21, 2023)

A factory worker in Lesotho receives a COVID-19 vaccine (Photo by United States Agency for International Development; as a work of the U.S. government, the image is in the public domain in the United States.)

Disclaimer: I am NOT an anti-vaxxer. Quite the opposite, at the earliest opportunity during the COVID-19 pandemic, I scheduled Pfizer/Moderna vaccinations for myself, my wife, my teenage son and my in-laws. I did the same for the first and second boosters. Nonetheless, I still contracted the Omicron variant (BA.5) last spring and spent two days with a fever hovering around 104°F. I genuinely believe, if not for the Moderna vaccine, I would have died.

I never took this virus lightly…and still don’t. Irrational as it may be now with the far less virulent Omicron variant, COVID-19 still scares this crap out of me.

But that doesn’t cloud my ability to think objectively about the COVID-19 vaccines and whether the CDC pursued the most prudent policies during their rollout…

When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin fell to the ground after a relatively routine helmet-to-chest hit from Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins, many of us understandably thought: ‘This is not normal’ summarizes the dozens of social media posts that started rolling in on my phone minutes after Hamlin’s collapse.

The American College of Cardiology estimates that approximately 100 to 150 sudden cardiac arrests, resulting in…