{"id":278112,"date":"2023-12-16T06:30:22","date_gmt":"2023-12-16T06:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=278112"},"modified":"2023-12-18T08:58:10","modified_gmt":"2023-12-18T08:58:10","slug":"this-is-bigger-than-covid-why-are-so-many-americans-dying-early","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=278112","title":{"rendered":"This is bigger than COVID: Why are so many Americans dying early?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pierre Kory and Mary Beth Pfeiffer \u2013 The Hill Dec 12, 2023<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf recently took to X to mourn the \u201ccatastrophic<\/a>\u201d decline in U.S. life expectancy.<\/p>\n

But his post, which hit on smoking, diet, chronic illness and health care, ignored the obvious: People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID-19 waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent.<\/p>\n

Life insurers have been consistently sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, \u201cexcess,\u201d deaths, which claimed\u00a0158,000<\/a>\u00a0more Americans<\/a>\u00a0in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019. That exceeds America\u2019s combined losses from\u00a0every war<\/a>\u00a0since Vietnam. Congress should urgently work with insurance experts to investigate this troubling trend.<\/p>\n

With the worst of COVID behind us, annual deaths for all causes should be back to pre-pandemic levels \u2014 or even lower because of the loss of so many sick and infirm Americans. Instead, the death toll remains \u201calarming<\/a>,\u201d \u201cdisturbing<\/a>,\u201d and deserving of \u201curgent attention<\/a>,\u201d according to insurance industry articles.<\/p>\n

Actuarial reports \u2014 used by insurers to inform decisions \u2014 show deaths occurring disproportionately among\u00a0young working-age people<\/a>. Nonetheless, America\u2019s chief health manager, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opted in September to archive its excess deaths\u00a0webpage<\/a>\u00a0with a note stating, \u201cthese datasets will no longer be updated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Money, of course, is a motivating issue for insurers. In 2020, death claims took their biggest one-year leap since the 1918 influenza scourge, jumping\u00a015.4 percent<\/a>\u00a0to $90 billion in payouts. After hitting $100 billion in 2021,\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0slowed in 2022, but are still above 2019. Indemnity experts are urging the adoption of an\u00a0early-warning program<\/a>\u00a0to detect looming health problems among people with life insurance and keep them\u00a0alive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unlike in the pandemic\u2019s early phase, these deaths are not primarily among the old. For people 65 and over, deaths in the second quarter of 2023 were 6 percent\u00a0below<\/em>\u00a0the pre-pandemic norm, according to a new report from the\u00a0Society of Actuaries<\/a>. Mortality was 26 percent higher among insured 35-to-44-year-olds, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOVID-19 claims do not fully explain the increase in incurred claim incidence,\u201d the Society\u00a0said<\/a>. COVID-19 deaths\u00a0dropped<\/a>\u00a084 percent from the first three quarters of 2021 to the same period in 2023.<\/p>\n

To some extent, we know\u00a0what<\/em>\u00a0is killing the young, with an actuarial\u00a0analysis<\/a>\u00a0of government data showing mortality increases in liver, kidney and cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes.\u00a0Drug overdoses<\/a>\u00a0also soared nationwide, but not primarily in the young working class.<\/p>\n

Therein lies the most pressing question for insurers, epidemiologists and health agency officials. Why is the traditionally healthiest sector of our society \u2014 young, employed, insured workers \u2014 dying at such rates? Public health officials aggressively oversaw the pandemic response, for better or worse. Why aren\u2019t they looking into this?<\/p>\n

In the United Kingdom, where post-pandemic\u00a0excess deaths<\/a>\u00a0in similar demographics also persist, a government-funded independent\u00a0inquiry<\/a>\u00a0is underway. \u201cWith each passing week of the COVID inquiry,\u201d the BBC\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0recently, \u201cit is clear there were deep flaws in the way decisions were made and information provided during the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United States needs such an examination of the measures taken to fight the pandemic. This probe \u2014 by a high-level, unbiased commission \u2014 should focus on what worked and what did not.<\/p>\n

Lockdowns limited access to education, social interaction and health care with documented harm to\u00a0childhood development<\/a>,\u00a0mental health<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the economy<\/a>. Treatment protocols dictated how doctors should deliver COVID care \u2014 primarily in hospitals and with expensive medicines \u2014 and limited early access to generic drugs that might have helped.<\/p>\n

Vaccines were given to more than\u00a0270 million people<\/a>, among them babies, pregnant women and workers under employer mandates. The therapeutic\u2019s \u201cwarp speed,\u201d\u00a0emergency use<\/a>\u00a0authorization must be part of any post-pandemic analysis, in light of more than 1 million\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0of possible harm to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System and a new Yale University\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0validating a chronic post-vaccination syndrome.<\/p>\n

Finally, government officials who sanctioned unprecedented censorship of dissent \u2014 enforcing pandemic measures through media pressure \u2014 must be called to account.<\/p>\n

Actuaries and industry analysts\u00a0predict<\/a>\u00a0excess deaths will continue among people with life insurance through 2030 and are \u201canticipated to be highest at younger ages.\u201d This prediction defies normal expectations of mortality for a robust population of people with life insurance. Now consider how other\u00a0disability<\/a>-afflicted,\u00a0poorly insured<\/a>\u00a0Americans may fare.<\/p>\n

To ensure future generations are protected and to be ready for the possibility of another pandemic, Congress needs to assess what worked and what did not.<\/p>\n

Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., is president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.<\/em><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life insurers have been consistently sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, \u201cexcess,\u201d deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019. That\u2019s almost triple the number of U.S. soldiers slain in Vietnam. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":238337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[105,117,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coronavirus","category-depopulation","category-Health_and_the_New_World_Order"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=278112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278113,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278112\/revisions\/278113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/238337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=278112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=278112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=278112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}