Misleading: Hank Aaron Died from COVID Vaccine

Misbar has discovered that Hank Aaron died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 86 according to ESPN.com. Mr. Aaron, former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, and former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Louis Sullivan were accompanied by their spouses and other civil rights leaders when they were vaccinated for COVID-19 several weeks earlier according to MLB.com .

According to WSB-TV Atlanta, the Fulton County, Georgia’s medical examiner released a statement reporting that the cause of death for baseball legend Hank Aaron was natural causes. The autopsy report said that Aaron did not have any COVID-19 symptoms. In his medical history, the report listed only prostate issues and hypertension.

As a result of Mr. Aaron’s death which followed closely after his COVID-19 vaccine, some saw it as an opportunity to tie the two events together. 

While there have been some concern with those who are frail or elderly receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at the Emory University School of Medicine, told NBC.com that he had "absolute confidence that his death has nothing to do with the vaccine and it has to do with the fact that he was old and frail."

According to the Orlando-Sun Sentinel, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a team assigned to investigate all reported reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine, plow through medical records, and identify any patterns. For example, the CDC is investigating 16 deaths in Florida that occurred shortly after the individuals received their vaccination. Those individuals range in age from 56 to 94, and 13 died within two days of receiving a vaccine. Only one had received a second dose, according to reports in the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. JAMA.com reports that the majority of vaccine trials for COVID-19 excluded older adults so there are still questions to be answered about the safety of the vaccine for the elderly. 

There is no proof that the cause of Mr. Aaron’s death was due to a COVID-19 vaccine. However, because relatively few people over the age of 80 participated in vaccine trials and there have been some reports of death in the frail and elderly after the vaccine, it is too soon to say for sure if Mr. Aaron’s death was in any way related to the COVID-19 vaccine.