“After several months of searching, I finally found this video,” one Facebook user recently boasted to his friends. “They tried to keep it from being published on social media because it reveals all the young people who suddenly died from the jab!”
The internet user also shared the 46-second video he had been looking for for so long. This one has certainly been circulating for a long time. A woman who shared the post last December quoted the following information: “In 12 months of 2022, 1598 athletes. Suffered from heart attack. Of them 1100 died… Do you even understand that they want to kill you… (language unedited – ed. note).”
The video has been shared online for even longer, and the portal 15min also wrote about it. The hoax has been spreading since at least the beginning of 2023. It was then debunked by fact-checkers from AFP, AP, “USA Today”, “FactCheck”, “The Journal”. Misleading information about alleged athlete deaths from vaccines has also been rejected in scientific and universitypublications.
Internet users circulating the clip falsely claim that the people shown in it died due to vaccines (some were merely unwell for a short time) and manipulate information found in blogs. Officially published reliable data does not confirm such assumptions.
Unknown if filmed after vaccinations
The video is compiled from dozens of unrelated scenes, filmed in various locations and at various times, mostly during sports competitions. They are linked by the same situation – one of the people seen on screen collapses (most likely having lost consciousness) or at least feels unwell, some are convulsing, others are being resuscitated with heart massage.
“In 12 months of 2022, 1,598 athletes suffered heart attacks, 1,100 of them died,” is written in English at the top, probably explaining the filmed events.
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But some man off-screen talks about “5G (connection – ed. note), interacting with vaccines,” claiming that the alleged goal was “to infect us with remotely controlled prion swarms in the brain, even before they cause COVID.”
A prion is a protein that can cause other proteins in the brain to misfold. The exact causes of their formation are unknown. Diseases caused by these proteins are usually fatal, though rare, perhaps the best known being Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (formerly also called mad cow disease).
Neither prions nor, even less so, 5G connection links with SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been proven; this is only mentioned in conspiracytheories.
See also: Again linking COVID-19 vaccines with deaths: based on numbers found in a blog
The assumptions that athletes were struck down by COVID-19 vaccines, as claimed in the video, are also unfounded. It is unclear when they were filmed – before the pandemic or when vaccination was already possible, or if they were vaccinated at all, or if they had health problems (perhaps even related to sports activities).
Therefore, to link athletes and other people with certain vaccines all at once, and then to blame the latter for the worst outcome, is incorrect.
Fainted for other reasons
The portal 15min has already written about some of the people seen in the video. At the 10-second mark, American nurse Tiffany Dover, one of the first to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in late 2020, indeed felt unwell after the vaccine. The young woman later explained that she had fainted similarly not for the first time, most likely due to vagus nerve (Latin: nervus vagus) stimulation.
See also: After internet users “killed off” the fainted nurse, doctors explain: such a reaction to any vaccine is normal
At the 21-second mark, the basketball player who collapsed on the ground is Keyontae Johnson, a player for the University of Florida’s “Gators” team. This happened on December 12, 2020, two days before Americans began to be vaccinated against coronavirus. Therefore, it is impossible that his health deterioration was caused by vaccines.
From 29 seconds, the video shows NCAA referee Bert Smith similarly fainting. He lost consciousness on March 31, 2021, just as the men’s tournament playoffs began between the “Gonzaga Bulldogs” and “Southern California Trojans”. The man was later diagnosed with a blood clot in his lung. Within a couple of days in the hospital, his blood was thinned with medication, and the clot disappeared.
See also: People faint even from pain or stress, but internet users are quick to blame vaccines
At the 40-second mark, a woman faints during a press conference. This footage was also used in the actively circulated hoax in the autumn of 2021 about the alleged fainting of European Medicines Agency head Emer Cooke.
See also: And again falling “after vaccines”: people fainted due to coffee instead of breakfast, not due to vaccines
In fact, it was Tanja Erichsen, head of the Pharmacovigilance Department of the Danish Medicines Agency. Her workplace assured that the fainting was not related to vaccines, as the woman had not yet been vaccinated.
Deaths – dozens, not thousands
The mere fact that a person felt unwell or that their life ended after a vaccine does not mean that the vaccine was the cause. This can also happen due to various diseases, or old age. Statistics show that death is an extremely rare side effect of COVID-19 vaccines, of which, according to various data, up to 13 billion doses have been administered worldwide so far.
Correlation in time does not confirm causation. The increased numbers of vaccinations and accidents in autumn are unrelated. At that time, flu vaccinations begin, and road accidents may increase due to deteriorating weather conditions, longer dark hours of the day, and even due to the time change at the end of October.
Thus, not every adverse event, such as fainting or even death after vaccination, means that it was directly caused by the vaccine. Claims about hundreds, thousands, or even millions of deaths from COVID-19 vaccines arise from a misunderstanding of how certain adverse event monitoring systems work or a conscious desire to manipulate their data.
One of the most frequently mentioned such systems in hoaxes is VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) used in the USA. There, doctors and residents are required to report all deaths and other health-related events after vaccination, even if they are completely unrelated to the vaccine (for example, a vaccinated person dies a week later simply because they were already elderly). Therefore, VAERS data cannot be considered reliable without additional analysis.
There is no overall precise statistic on how many deaths worldwide were specifically caused by vaccines, as their adverse event registration and evaluation systems differ. An analysis published in early 2022 indicated 38 such deaths after 8 billion vaccine doses administered. In Australia, systematized 2022 data showed 14 deaths directly caused by vaccines after 65 million vaccinations.
In 2025, it was determined that over 4 years, the all-cause mortality rate for people vaccinated against coronavirus was actually lower (0.4%) than for unvaccinated people (0.6%).
Health authorities agree that coronavirus vaccines have saved millions of lives, and severe adverse events are extremely rare.
15min verdict: lacking context. The video with fainting people does not prove that COVID-19 vaccines killed a thousand athletes or that they frequently cause deaths. This is a very rare adverse side effect of the vaccine.
The publication was prepared by 15min in cooperation with “Meta”, aiming to stop the spread of misleading news on the social network. More about the program and its rules – here.
