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The baseless tweets began to circulate within minutes of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s stunning collapse on the field during “Monday Night Football.” Anti-vaxxers and right-wing provocateurs sought to link the injury that left Hamlin in critical condition and the coronavirus vaccine, without any evidence. Their claims built on years of coronavirus vaccine misinformation that has been seeded across social media. (Zakrzewski and Weber, 1/3)

While the Bills released an official statement Tuesday morning confirming that Hamlin, who is 24 years old, suffered cardiac arrest and is in critical condition, some people on social media have been pointing blame at the COVID-19 vaccine in the latest attempt to undermine the vaccine’s efficacy. Although Hamlin’s personal vaccine status remains unknown, the NFL reported earlier this year that 95% of players had been vaccinated. (Thompson Payton, 1/3)

For some experts, the episode called to mind a rare, often lethal condition called commotio cordis that can occur when a person is struck sharply in the chest, as Hamlin was. Such a blow, when it occurs at a specific point in the heart’s pumping cycle, can send the organ into an abormal rhythm that disrupts the flow of blood to vital organs. (John Milton, 1/3)

While Hamlin's team and family have yet to confirm exactly what happened, many of the doctors following his case online have narrowed it down to one likely cause: commotio cordis (kuh-MOH-dee-oh KOR-dis). (Treisman, 1/3)

The fact that Hamlin was alive at all, though, was the product of teamwork between Bengals and Bills medical personnel, and the NFL’s “emergency action plan,” which prepared them for a situation that hadn’t occurred in the league since 1971, when the Lions’ Chuck Hughes suffered a cardiac incident on the field and was later pronounced dead. (Volin, 1/3)

Te’Jaan Ali was playing basketball in a school gym on the South Side of Chicago when he started feeling hot. The heat in the gym — which didn’t have air conditioning — was likely just as bad as the sweltering temperatures outside, which reached 90 degrees on July 18, 2020. Ali, 19, stood in front of a fan and collapsed. Less than two hours later, he died in a hospital emergency room of a heart condition. (Perez and Anderson, 1/3)