Mortality Rates Among Young Adults Spiked During Pandemic — But Why?
Mortality rates among adults ages 25-44 spiked between 2020 and 2023, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a paper published in JAMA Network Open.
Mortality rates among adults ages 25-44 spiked between 2020 and 2023, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a paper published today in JAMA Network Open.
The paper examined excess mortality among early adults in the U.S. from 1999 to 2023 and concluded that early adult mortality has “risen substantially” in two stages, from 2011 to 2019 and 2020 to 2023.
Excess mortality among this group peaked during the pandemic years and then decreased, but not to pre-pandemic levels.
The biggest driver of excess mortality by 2023 was “drug poisoning,” they reported. However, they said that “other external and natural causes exceeded what prior trends would have projected.”
The authors concluded there is a “worsening” mortality crisis among this age group and policy conclusions ought to address the intensifying causes of excess mortality — which they said were opioid use, alcohol consumption, traffic safety and dietary risks.
They also noted that the two “distinct phases” of increased mortality before and after 2020 “may also suggest” a “need to attend to the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic,” which they said were long-term effects of infection, medical disruption and social dislocation.
Dr. Pierre Kory, who has written several op-eds calling attention to the explosions in excess mortality and their temporal associations with the vaccine rollout slammed the paper for not mentioning the likely impact of the vaccines.
“To read papers like this where the possible impact of the vaccines are not (and cannot) be mentioned makes it anti-science and essentially uninterpretable because one of the likely major variables can never be examined or discussed,” he said.
“To wit, in the conclusion there is no mention of the mRNA campaign’s potential influence,” he said. Instead, they safely say there may be a need to attend to the ongoing consequences of the pandemic.
All-cause mortality researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., who has extensively analyzed the links between pandemic countermeasures and all-cause mortality said research like this also fails to even question the fundamental causes of death.
The authors report on proximal causes of death like drug and alcohol use but don’t mention the fundamental causes of death like, for example, the loss of employment and loss of meaning that happened as a result of lockdowns, he said.
Articles like these, Rancourt said, are “purposefully not saying the important things.”
“It’s horrendously dishonest that these are the kinds of articles that get published in the opinion-leading journals,” Rancourt added. “It’s just completely dishonest that we’re going to be polite and diplomatic and just not really talk about what’s going on here.”
Kory added that other data, including deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS and “the inexplicable and unprecedented rises in group term life insurance claims among young people 25-44, which occurred suddenly in the 3rd quarter of 2021 when mandates were all the rage,” raised important questions about the temporal relationship between vaccine rollouts and excess mortality that weren’t addressed in the paper.
Authors failed to ask key questions about cause of death
The authors calculated monthly mortality rates using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that included cause of death along with mid-year population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau for adults ages 24-44 between 1999 and 2023. They created a model of mortality rates between 1999 to 2010 to project expected mortality trends from 2011 to 2023.
They calculated excess mortality for each cause of death — except for COVID-19 — by calculating the difference between observed and expected mortality for each year.
They found for all causes of death analyzed, there was significantly more excess death than expected in the post-2011 period. Early adult excess mortality was 34.6% higher than expected in 2019, according to their calculations, and “then further accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
They reported that in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, all-cause excess mortality was nearly three times higher than it had been in 2019 — 116.2 versus 41.7 deaths per 100,000.
By 2023, excess mortality rates had dropped, they said, but only to halfway between their 2019 and 2021 levels. They concluded that in 2023, early adult mortality remained 70% higher than would have been expected if trends from before 2011 had continued.
By 2023, the five causes of death that accounted for three-quarters of this high mortality rate included drug poisoning (31.8%), “residual natural-cause” (16%), transport-related deaths (14.1%), alcohol-related deaths (8.5%) and homicide (8.2%).
They also noted that cardiometabolic conditions, which include obesity, diabetes, stroke and heart failure, accounted for another 9.2% of deaths.
Rancourt said the paper’s methodology was deeply flawed and “the article would not have passed my peer review in its present state.”
“Their method of obtaining excess deaths by cause using trends from the baseline years 1999-2010, extrapolated to 2023, is dubious and unjustified,” he said. “They also fail to examine and report the degree to which the age structure within their age 25-44 year cohort changes throughout the baseline (1999-2010) and extrapolation (2011-2023) periods, which is a pivotal determinant of mortality trends.”
Rancourt said the authors covered the fact that they used different methods for all causes of death other than COVID-19. Unlike the other causes, where they extrapolated excess death from an estimated baseline, for COVID-19 they simply used the number of reported COVID-19 assigned deaths.
They are essentially “comparing apples and oranges,” he said.
Kory called the paper’s COVID-19 death numbers “jarring” because they report a massive amount of COVID-19 deaths in 2021, despite a vaccine being available. “It doesn’t look like the vaccine worked from that chart.”
Also jarring, he said, were “the steep and constant rises, starting in 2020 but continuing to increase to this day in the category of ‘other natural’ — why would so many young people be suddenly dying more of some sort of ‘natural’ cause?”
He pointed out that the data also showed peaks in 2021-2022 that then slowed in other categories including digestive, endocrine and “other external” categories.
Kory said:
“Why would the authors not discuss the need to dig deeper into these ‘other categories’ and try to understand what are those causes of deaths and why are they suddenly occurring so much in young people?
“It is a mystery which I believe could be solved if you put the missing piece of this puzzle, the ‘missing piece’ is the likelihood … that the mRNA campaign significantly contributed to these mysterious deaths. It should at least be discussed or mentioned as a possibility.
”Rancourt also said it was egregious that the authors didn’t investigate questions about the fundamental causes driving the excess deaths.
He said if he had reviewed the paper he would have asked, “What’s the point of writing a paper like this without addressing the fundamental causes of death? Many great scientists have said, you can’t do that. You can’t purposefully, willfully be blind to what’s really happening and report these secondary effects.”
Rancourt said that by looking at a younger population, rather than an older population that is even more vulnerable to deaths from things like medical error and vaccine toxicity, the authors could more easily sidestep addressing those key pandemic-related issues.
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Hmm.
Trends in this age group:
Blue light toxic
SV40
Irradiating themselves with smartwatches