by Selwyn Duke
“I’d describe it as catastrophic.” So said Food and Drug Administration commissioner Robert Califf in a recent series of tweets about a troubling but ignored problem: the major decline in life expectancy among young, working age people.
In fact, the number of “unexpected or, ‘excess,’ deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019 … exceeds America’s combined losses from every war since Vietnam,” wrote The Hill last week.
Some people want this problem to remain ignored, too. Just consider that “America’s chief health manager, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opted in September to archive its excess deaths webpage with a note stating, “these datasets will no longer be updated,” The Hill also informs.
The entities reporting this phenomenon, however, insurance companies, can’t play ostrich because they have to pay out on death claims. As to this, “In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, the industry distributed a record $100.28 billion in total death benefits, according to BestLink,” related Life Insurance News (LIN) in late October. “The higher-than-normal payouts began in 2020, the first year of the pandemic when insurers saw death benefits rise 15.4%, the biggest one-year increase since the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. The 2021 increase was 10.8%, but fell during the first nine months of 2022, from $74.27 billion in the same period in 2021. But that’s still higher than the $59.18 billion paid out during the same period in 2019 before the pandemic hit.”
As to the mortality’s precise magnitude, LINcited an authority who said that “generally, we’re at 13.9 deaths per 100,000, which is up perhaps 7% from where it should have been.” Yet this doesn’t truly illuminate the problem because this factors in mortality for those over 65, which actually declined six percent. Younger adult death rates, however, have increased more than 20 percent in 2023, according to the CDC.
The article at The Hill, written by Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance; and Mary Beth Pfeiffer, an investigative reporter, breaks the numbers down further.
“Mortality was 26 percent higher among insured 35-to-44-year-olds,” they write, “and 19 percent higher for 25-to-34-year-olds, continuing a death spike that peaked in the third quarter of 2021 at a staggering 101 percent and 79 percent above normal, respectively.” And what are the causes of death?
Data “show increased cardiac mortality in all ages,” writes LIN. “And even as COVID-related causes declined in 2022, others rose, particularly stroke, diabetes, kidney and liver diseases.” (To be precise, “COVID-19 deaths dropped 84 percent from the first three quarters of 2021 to the same period in 2023,” The Hill tells us. Yet even this statistic may be suspect, as stories abound about flu-induced and other deaths being labeled as “COVID” morality.)
As for what sparked this news story, here are FDA commissioner Califf’s initial tweets:
Califf mentions tobacco use in the last tweet, but this couldn’t help account for mortality increases because smoking rates have declined for many years now.
You can read all the official’s posts here. There is something, however, Califf didn’t mention — but that X respondents were quick to (example below).