The post mirrors other social media claims falsely tying the vaccines to the deaths of celebrities, including rapper DMX, baseball legend Hank Aaron and boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler.
We reached out to his talent agency for details, but did not hear back. News reports from People and TMZ credited a representative for Mitchell as saying the cause of death was a heart attack. In his hometown newspaper in Scotland, Mitchell was quoted as saying his doctor warned him never to train again after his heart stopped for almost 10 minutes during one of these procedures. In 2007, Mitchell said he was forced to quit bodybuilding after he had five major heart operations. What the post fails to mention is that Mitchell had a history of heart issues.
Mitchell’s Facebook page is now private, so we couldn’t verify whether the Facebook posts depicted in the video came from him. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The Instagram post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. One of them appears to show Mitchell responding to a commenter’s question by saying he received two shots of Sinovac-CoronaVac, the Chinese vaccine which the World Health Organization approved for emergency use in June, followed by the Pfizer-BioNTech shot. Screenshots of the comments under some of Mitchell’s posts have also circulated online.
The video then cuts to a July 24 headline announcing Mitchell’s death. It highlights what appear to be Facebook posts Mitchell made following each of his three vaccine shots, dated Feb. 8 Instagram video suggests the third shot was to blame for Mitchell’s death. Mitchell, who got the booster, was 65 years old.Īn Aug. Actor and former bodybuilder Mike Mitchell died July 23 from a heart attack in Turkey, a country that had begun offering COVID-19 vaccine booster shots a month earlier to health care workers and people over 50.