From Jeff Childers

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They might be starting to get the idea. “Americans,” the Mail reported, “are dropping dead from heart attacks at home at alarming rates, doctors warn.”

At home. Regular readers will recall that key phrase from years of C&C reporting sudden celebrity deaths. “At home” sudden deaths are a massive red flag in epidemiology, because they break the expected pattern of how and where fatal cardiac events typically happen— and more importantly, who they happen to.

Most fatal cardiac events follow years of diagnosed cardiovascular history, highly advertised warning signs (chest pain, fatigue, arrhythmia), and well-known high-risk settings where help is widely available: during sports, at work, in transit, and during exertion— but not quietly on the couch.

When a large number of people, particularly younger adults with no history of heart disease, begin dying alone and unexpectedly at home, it defies baseline expectations. This makes “at-home” deaths not just a red flag, but a canary in the clinical coal mine— a symptom of institutional denial, diagnostic blindness, and mass gaslighting.

According to the Mail’s story, researchers at Mass General Brigham, a Harvard-affiliated hospital, found heart-related deaths have skyrocketed +17% since the pandemic. “While the exact number is unknown,” the story said, “in many of these cases heart attacks have been at home, despite deaths in hospitals decreasing.”

The story mused about covid, but it mostly pointed its bony finger of blame at, get this, marijuana gummies. You can read the whole thing, but guess which possible iatrogenic cause was nowhere to be found? A medical intervention already known to cause myocarditis and pericarditis? A “safe and effective” solution whose deployment calendar fits neatly atop the timeline spotted by Mass General’s “scientists?”

You know the answer, even if the scientists pretend not to. What’s especially insulting is that the mRNA vaccines’ link to cardiac inflammation —especially in young people— is no longer even controversial. It’s in the literature! It’s in the CDC’s own data, and it’s been acknowledged by European health authorities. It’s even on the FDA-required jab label. Yet in the story and in the underlying study, that well-known and widely discussed iatrogenic risk was airbrushed right out, while speculative ‘lifestyle factors’ were inflated into the narrative void.

In a very cowardly fashion, they set up the defenseless marijuana industry as a decoy. Somebody has to go under the bus.

Perhaps we should be grateful that the researchers published the study at all. After all, they did tiptoe into dangerous territory, by highlighting the most damning signal: the fact that at-home SADS is a novel red flag. But they still chickened out before even speculating over whether the blessed mRNA juice might be at all involved, even just to say it needs further study.

But there’s a glass-half-full reading, which is that Trump’s new HHS climate is perhaps inviting researchers to take more risks. Maybe we’ll begin to see more, well, intellectually inquisitive research.

There’s a faint whiff in the air —like ozone before a storm— that something has shifted. Trump’s re-election and RFK Jr.’s confirmation as HHS Secretary have blown a cold wind through the public health bureaucracy. Agencies and researchers who once echoed the narrative with cult-like precision may now be sensing that the old incentives are cracking, and a new climate that rewards honesty over orthodoxy is quietly forming.

We can hope! Anyway, the Mail’s story was incremental progress.