The Story:
Baseball legend Hank Aaron, who began his career with the Indianapolis Clowns of the old “Negro League” in 1951, and who ended it in the mid 1970s as the Home Run King of Major League Baseball, passed away peacefully in his sleep on January 22, 2021. This fact, unsurprising in itself, has given rise to an odd controversy about the value, or otherwise, of the vaccines for Covid-19.
Significance:
Roughly two weeks before Aaron’s death, he received the first shot of Moderna’s two-shot vaccine at a health care clinic in Atlanta, Georgia. This was a well-publicized event, too: Aaron was part of a group of Black American celebrities, including Andrew Young, who all got vaccinated that day.
The proximity of the vaccination and Aaron’s death triggered a burst of commentary, especially in social media, treating this as proof that the vaccine is dangerous.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic, picked up on this commentary, tweeting that Aaron’s was just one of a “wave of suspicious deaths” of the recipients of the Moderna or Pfizer shots.
In Pill Form:
But the vaccination had in fact nothing to do with Aaron’s death. Aaron was 86 years old, and he had long suffered from prostate issues, osteoarthritis, and hypertension. The medical examiner’s report says that his death was not “due to any event other than that associated with his medical history.”
