In many ways I regret that it is necessary to write about the cause of death of a young man, at a time when his family, no doubt, are in the depths of untold grief. But if you’re a regular reader, then you’re probably a regular internet user, and therefore you have probably seen the thousands of insinuations about Dillon Quirke’s death that have proliferated since the tragic news broke.
You know the ones: They’re standard now. Somebody dies, usually younger than the age of 60, and people share the story online. They may include syringe emojis, or raised eyebrow emojis, or, if they’re especially brave, just say the thing outright: “Another victim of the jab, RIP”, or something like that.
Some of the people who instinctively believe such things are my readers. When I push back against it, I get stick from them: Some of them call me a big pharma shill, others just naïve. They demand that I look at charts which are alleged to show an unexplained spike in the deaths of young people, and so on. And I do.
It is, I think, true to say that the Covid 19 vaccines were the most falsely advertised product in recent history. We were all told, quite unambiguously, that the vaccines would stop us getting covid. That was untrue. We were then told that the vaccines would keep us all out of hospital, and that only the unvaccinated were going to end up in hospital – remember “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? Yeah, you don’t hear that phrase so much, anymore. We were also told that the vaccines were safe, and this is where the problems begin. People who – not unreasonably – feel as if they were lied to on the first two points are increasingly unwilling to believe the third. Indeed, it’s safe to say that there is a whole community online who will never – ever – now be convinced that the vaccines are not killing people in their thousands.
But there are problems here, related to how we process information: The biggest is what we might call “observation bias”. By that, I mean that when you suddenly start noticing things that you had never noticed before, your mind makes a link that it shouldn’t necessarily be making. So, a young person dies suddenly on a sports field, and then another one does the same – maybe this time in Palermo, Italy, or in the British Virgin Islands, or Tipperary, or Angola – and people share the story with a caption like “another one!!!”. The point is, such deaths are actually very rare, but can appear much more common when you are suddenly paying attention to deaths around the globe that you’d have ignored two years ago.
In point of fact, the sudden death of young athletes has been a problem for years. For example, the FIFA sudden death registry records 617 sudden deaths of young players playing soccer alone worldwide in the years 2014-18, long preceding any covid vaccine. That’s more than 200 a year. In other words, long before the vaccine came along, soccer players were dying at the rate of one every few days, worldwide. You just weren’t paying attention, because before now, you weren’t that interested in the sudden and tragic death of a young fellow in a reserves game in Uruguay.
And frankly, the focus on the vaccine also obscures other possible causes, like the increase in cocaine and steroid use amongst young athletes, which has been well documented and reported for some time.
Gript gets inundated, every week, with requests that we report “the vaccine deaths”. And, of course, we do, when they are confirmed. Because there have been vaccine deaths: My friend Mark Steyn, at GB News, has very bravely highlighted many such cases. It is, I think, true that there has been a wide reluctance in the media to take this issue on head first, in part because establishing cause of death is difficult, and in part because it is very easy to start a panic where there is no real cause for one. But a consequence of that has been, frankly, that many people who have suffered real and genuine ill-effects have often been dismissed or written off as cranks because some journalists fear being called anti-vaxxers by their colleagues more than they fear this story being under-reported.
But there are also many cases which are being highlighted by those with concerns about the vaccine which just do not fit the bill. Dillon Quirke, lord rest him, is one:
Dillon Quirke, the 24-year-old Tipperary hurler who died on Friday during a club match in Thurles, had spoken two years ago about being diagnosed with myocarditis.
Quirke revealed he had been diagnosed in 2019 with myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle. In an interview with the Pundit Arena sport website in 2020, Quirke said he received the diagnosis after collapsing at home the previous year and was told to stop any physical contact for three months.
On returning to hurling, he collapsed again and was taken to hospital by ambulance. This led to him taking a year-long break from the sport.
This is somebody with a long history, tragically, of heart issues, long predating the covid 19 vaccines. Indeed, with that medical history – and this is pure speculation – he would have fallen into the category of people medically advised not to take a vaccine. A history of myocarditis was listed, by the HSE, in their advice to medical professionals as a reason not to give somebody a vaccine. There is vastly more evidence that Mr. Quirke’s death was unconnected to the vaccine than there is to the contrary.
But even writing that feels tawdry. Mr. Quirke is dead, and his family and friends are in the deepest of mourning. The intent by some to conduct a public, online inquest into his passing feels less motivated by a desire to comfort them, and more motivated by a desire to be proved right about the vaccines.
None of this is doing anybody any good. Frankly, there should already be an enquiry into the vaccination process, and whether mistakes were made. We know they were over-sold, and that many claims made by vaccine boosters were wrong. We know too that there were indeed many cases of serious adverse events. It would be good policy to have a full public enquiry into the conduct of the covid pandemic in general, and a focus on the vaccines in particular.
What is not good practice, though, is to cite every single unexpected or unexplained death as evidence of some massive big-pharma cover up. Often, as in this case, you’ll likely be wrong.