A POST SHARED on social media in Ireland, claiming to quote funeral directors, has suggested that three 15-year-old children died of a heart attack in December 2022 due to Covid vaccines.

The claim was posted in a photo on an Instagram page called Riseup_Eire last week, and appeared to be the top of an article with a headline “What funeral directors know that you don’t”.

The subheading, accompanied by a byline ‘Steve Kirsch’, read: “In 78 years, they never had a 15-year-old who died from a heart attack. In December 2022, they had 1 a week for three weeks straight. Nobody is talking about it publicly.”

The owner of the Riseup_Eire page also captioned the image “what they don’t want you to know… worldwide genocide in a global depopulation agenda”.

However, the post does not make clear that the statistics in the article are based on anecdotal evidence and not official, while the author is also based in the United States.

It is also misleading to suggest that young people did not die of heart attacks before the Covid pandemic, and that they are doing so now due to side-effects from Covid-19 vaccines.

The words in the photo are taken from a newsletter from Substack sent on 11 February by Steve Kirsch, an American entrepreneur who is known for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

The Substack platform is an independent service that allows writers to send newsletters to followers independently.

Kirsch has previously promoted the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as cures for Covid-19, despite both of these being unproven. He has also claimed that Covid vaccines are “toxic” and that 0.1% of people who receive an mRNA vaccine die as a result.

He also writes a Substack newsletter in which he regularly calls for investigations into alleged “vaccine injuries”, shares data claiming that vaccines have caused millions of deaths worldwide and promotes well-known anti-vaccine campaigners.

In the edition of Kirsch’s newsletter sent on 11 February, which is the basis of the claim shared on Instagram, he claims to have spoken to an anonymous “owner [sic] of many funeral homes across the US”.

“Overall, their business is up by 50% after the vaccines rolled out and it’s not proportional… young people are a greater portion of the deaths,” Kirsch writes.

He later adds: “In the 78 years they’ve been in business, they can’t recall ever having seen a 15-year old die from a heart attack. In December 2022, they had 1 a week for three weeks straight.”

And Kirsch also says there has been an increase in the number of children dying of heart attacks compared to pre-pandemic times, claiming that such cases “are up by 100 [times] over normal”.

But in a summary of his claims at the bottom of his newsletter, Kirsch acknowledges that this data is “anecdotal” and suggests that true data is being hidden because “if the data was made public, people would find out the truth and lose faith in the medical community”.

The Journal could not find any official statistics that could back up the claim that children in the United States – or Ireland – are dying of heart attacks at a rate that is 100 times higher than pre-pandemic times.

Final statistics on underlying causes of death in the US, released by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), only go up to 2019, the year before Covid-19 began spreading around the globe.

In Ireland, deaths among those aged between 0 and 24 due to heart issues or heart disease remained in single figures in 2021 and during the first two quarters of 2022, the last quarter for which figures are available according to the CSO. Deaths in this age group did not increase by a factor of 100.

The same statistics also show that not a single death was recorded in this age bracket due to an adverse event from a Covid-19 vaccine in either year, with just a single death recorded in a much older age group in 2021 or 2022.

Kirsch also suggested that nobody aged 15 died from a heart attack before last year, but sadly thousands of children aged 15 and under do die of heart attacks every year, and did so in the years before the authorisation of Covid-19 vaccines.

Since the 1980s, doctors and health authorities have described deaths from sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS), which occurs when adolescents and young adults pass away unexpectedly from previously undetected heart problems.

Although the true cause is unknown and can vary, medical examiners consider different factors in these deaths, including the person’s nutrition, metabolism and genetics, as well as levels of toxicology and heart disease. 

According to one study published by the National Library of Medicine in the US, which examined cardiovascular death data across 16 US states between 2005 and 2009, heart conditions are among the leading causes of death among people aged between 1 and 19.

The Journal has been unable to find any data or evidence showing a marked increase in deaths as a result of SADS since Covid-19 vaccines were approved – and although the syndrome is rare, it did occur before the pandemic.

It is simply misleading to use unsupported anecdotal evidence to suggest young people are dying of heart attacks more often than they did before 2020.

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