Why are Athletes Suddenly Dying after COVID?
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough interviews authors Roger A. Scott and Julie Scott about their book examining an apparent rise in sudden deaths and serious health events among athletes following the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
Roger Scott, a longtime strength and conditioning coach with more than two decades working with competitive and elite athletes, including a stint with China’s Olympic speed-skating team that ended in 2019, describes the impetus for the project.
After the pandemic and the subsequent vaccine campaigns, he noticed patterns that stood out to him as both a coach and a sports statistician who had worked in television. Athletes who should have been at the peak of physical condition began experiencing unexpected problems.
Starting the book in 2022, he set out to document what he viewed as underreported issues, arguing that media coverage had been incomplete and that someone from the sports community needed to speak up. He emphasizes that his perspective comes from care for athletes rather than a claim of superior insight.
Julie Scott, who has a background in medicine and dentistry before becoming a top real estate agent, shares a similar unease. Emergency-use authorization, the absence of traditional long-term trials, and the appearance of myocarditis in previously healthy young athletes struck her as unacceptable.
She notes that athletes represent the “picture of health” and that myocarditis is not a normal occurrence in this population.
The couple discuss their own choices: neither Roger nor Julie took the COVID-19 vaccines; one of their three grown sons did, while the others did not. Dr. McCullough discloses that he, his wife, and his daughter declined the shots, though his son—a highly accomplished collegiate runner and medical student—received them, prompting ongoing paternal concern.
Roger explains that he deliberately covered multiple domains—pharmaceutical companies, informed consent, and clinical observations—so that readers could not easily dismiss the material as one-sided.
He interviewed embalmers who reported unusual white, fibrous clots appearing in early 2021. One chapter, “Without Athletes, We Have No Sports,” lists approximately 200 athletes under age 60 (the majority under 50) who died, using only first names or other limited identifiers to protect privacy and reduce legal risk.
The cases are categorized largely around cardiac events, blood clots, unknown or unlisted causes, and other categories that align with areas McCullough has previously highlighted in the peer-reviewed literature (cardiac injury, clotting, immune dysregulation, and neoplastic concerns).
McCullough outlines two primary mechanisms by which COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, Janssen, and later Novavax) could contribute to sudden death in athletes: myocarditis leading to sudden cardiac arrest (often during exertion or in the early waking hours) and large pulmonary emboli. The discussion references high-profile cases.
Damar Hamlin’s on-field cardiac arrest is described by McCullough as classic for vaccine-related injury; Hamlin later declined to discuss the cause when pressed by Michael Strahan.
Other examples include early reports around Hank Aaron, a CNN legal correspondent who died shortly after vaccination, Kirk Herbstreit’s reported long-COVID and clotting issues, Deion Sanders’ multiple arterial and venous clots that nearly cost him a leg (followed by a documentary that never linked the events to vaccination despite Sanders’ earlier public promotion of the shots and criticism of Aaron Rodgers), Victor Wembanyama’s clotting episode requiring months off, Christian Eriksen’s two cardiac arrests (the first widely associated with vaccination timing, followed by an ICD and later a second event), and cases involving college and professional players such as those connected to USC and Bronny James’ near-miss. John Stockton is noted as independently tracking roughly 1,100 athlete deaths.
A central theme is the contrast between rigorous anti-doping regimes—where athletes face severe penalties for prohibited substances—and the relative lack of scrutiny or informed consent surrounding vaccine mandates. Package inserts for the early COVID-19 vaccines were effectively blank, leaving athletes without the detailed risk information normally provided for pharmaceuticals.
Leagues and schools imposed requirements even after a fatal case of Moderna myocarditis in a 42-year-old man was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2021. Athletes such as Aaron Rodgers and Novak Djokovic who resisted faced professional consequences; others, including Sage Steele, encountered career repercussions for expressing discomfort.
Cam Newton later suggested many NFL players used fake vaccine cards. McCullough recounts a private conversation with an NFL coach who said players’ primary fear was not COVID-19 itself—serious cases among elite athletes were rare—but job loss.
Public figures who experienced clear complications (Herbstreit, Sanders, Anthony Fauci with a pulmonary embolism) largely remained silent or continued promoting vaccination, a pattern McCullough attributes to fear of further professional or social cost after already losing so much. Surviving families sometimes exhibit a similar mental block.
watch the full interview below:
The authors issue a call for current and former athletes—college, professional, or Olympic—to share experiences of career or health impacts they attribute to vaccination, noting that such stories have been suppressed by fear of consequences within the multi-trillion-dollar sports industry.
McCullough offers clinical observations from thousands of patients: a substantial fraction of those with myocarditis or clotting show genetic predispositions affecting cardiac or coagulation proteins. Work by Yonker and colleagues suggests that children who develop myocarditis often produce high levels of anti-spike antibodies that fail to fully neutralize the protein, allowing it to damage heart tissue.
He expresses cautious optimism about “spike detoxification” using high-dose nattokinase, bromelain, curcumin, and colchicine (elements of the McCullough Protocol), noting that Hamlin reportedly avoided an ICD and returned to play. Similar recovery pathways are discussed for other athletes, though leagues have largely walked back formal mandates while some educational and clinical training programs retain residual requirements.
The conversation closes with mutual appreciation. Roger and Julie position the book as a fact-based effort—complete with occasional sarcasm about 2020 absurdities—to equip families, parents, and athletes with information so that the next generation can pursue sports with genuine informed consent rather than institutional pressure.
McCullough frames the work as consistent with his broader public warnings about vaccine safety signals in healthy populations. The overall message is that elite athletes, long regarded as the picture of health, experienced an anomalous wave of cardiac arrests, clotting events, and sudden deaths that coincided with mass vaccination, that institutional incentives favored silence or denial, and that open discussion and individual risk assessment remain essential.