Skip to content

Thursday, Apr. 8, 2021

Were the deaths of baseball great Hank Aaron and famed boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler caused by the COVID-19 vaccine?

Dana Ford, Lead Stories
no

Contrary to social media posts linking the deaths to vaccines, there's no publicly available evidence that's true.

Hagler's wife wrote on Facebook: "I was the only person close to him until the last minute … For sure wasn't the vaccine that caused his death. "

According to Aaron's former team, the Atlanta Braves, he died peacefully in his sleep.

Louis Sullivan, who was vaccinated with Aaron and who is the founding dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine, said, "People who are trying to say there was a relationship between Hank's death and the vaccine are absolutely wrong."

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Lead Stories is a fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. It scouts for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. It actively monitors the fake-news ecosystem and doesn’t wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.