Doctor’s office notice not proof of COVID-19 vaccines’ danger to young athletes

A Facebook post shared a photo of a New Jersey doctor’s office notice as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous for student athletes.

The April 9 post highlighted parts of the notice that said "COVID-19 vaccinations affect your risk" of "sudden cardiac death on the playing field," and that the office "may not be able to clear" vaccinated athletes’ sports physicals without "lab work and possibly an echocardiogram to rule out potential heart damage." 

The post resonated with people who oppose COVID-19 vaccines. "Amazing, even after they knew early on that the vaccine was affecting children's hearts, they still kept pushing it for even younger kids," one commenter wrote. "And they called us all names for 3 years," said another.

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The notice from the doctor’s office — Morris Sussex Family Practice in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey (now called Morris Sussex Direct Family Practice) — is real. But one notice from a single doctor’s office does not equate to evidence that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of sudden cardiac arrests in young athletes.

(Facebook screenshot)

The notice was shared in a New Jersey school’s Facebook group in July 2022 and it has been on the practice’s website since at least March 2022, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The notice was updated in January 2023 to say that having a COVID-19 infection also may lead the office to require additional tests for sports physicals. The notice now says, "COVID infection and COVID vaccinations affect your risk" of sudden cardiac death.

But scientific studies have found no link between COVID-19 vaccinations and increased risk of cardiac arrest in young athletes. The narrative that the two are associated, widespread throughout the pandemic by groups opposed to COVID-19 vaccines, has been consistently debunked by journalists, including PolitiFact.

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Sports cardiology experts told PolitiFact in January 2023 that they haven’t seen a sharp rise in athlete cardiac arrest episodes since the COVID-19 vaccines came out.

There is a rare, but increased risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining outside the heart) mostly in male teens and young adults within seven days of receiving a second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said.

A 2022 study in England showed the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 infection is substantially higher than the risk of myocarditis after a vaccine.

Health experts say myocarditis usually goes away quickly but severe cases can permanently damage the heart muscle and in some cases lead to sudden cardiac arrest.

But an April CDC study that focused on young people, although not specifically athletes, provides more evidence that there’s no connection between the vaccines and sudden cardiac deaths.

Investigators examined Oregon death certificate data from June 2021 to December 2022 for 1,292 people ages 16 to 30. None of the death certificates listed vaccination as an immediate or contributing cause of death. 

Of the total, 101 deaths could not exclude a cardiac cause. Vaccination records were available for 88 of those people, and 40 had received at least one dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Of those 40, three died within 100 days of a vaccine dose. 

Two of those people had underlying illnesses such as congestive heart failure and chronic respiratory failure, and the cause of death of the other was "undermined natural cause." A "follow-up with the medical examiner could neither confirm nor exclude a vaccine-associated adverse event as a cause of death for this decedent," the study said.

"The data do not support an association of COVID-19 vaccination with sudden cardiac death among previously healthy young persons," the study concluded.

We rate the claim that a notice from a New Jersey doctor’s office proves that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous for athletes False.