Sharpest Life Expectancy Drop in 100 Years Has More Causes Than COVID-19

In the wake of a recent government study attributing the sharpest two-year decline in the average life expectancy of Americans in 2020 and 2021 mainly to COVID deaths, some analysts are pointing to emerging statistics showing more people died after the rollout of the vaccine than did during the height of the pandemic.

That’s while they’re also ascribing the historic decline to broader factors including the negative effects from the lockdowns, deferred medical care, and the vaccines themselves. This approach is what’s referred to as “all-cause mortality,” which epidemiologists use to refer to the number of deaths from all causes above what would be expected under normal circumstances.

The study titled “Provisional Life Expectancy Estimates 2021” (pdf) was conducted by The National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was carried out to assess the effects of excess mortality related to COVID-19 and mainly showed that in 2021, the average American could expect to live until the age of 76, a figure that represents a loss of almost three years since 2019 (pdf). This is the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years.

Shifting Fatality Numbers After Vaccines and Mandates

One former Wall Street figure and author of the upcoming  “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022” has discovered some particularly concerning statistics.

Ed Dowd told The Epoch Times that in 2021 after the vaccine was released, excess deaths for millennials age 25–44 climbed to 84 percent above the trend line (actuary baseline) above the normal death rate (based on 2015–19), and the rate far exceeded that in 2020. Specifically, in the second half of 2021, Dowd found that an excessive number of 61,000 millennials died.

“That’s the number that died in Vietnam War in one year,” said Dowd, who as a previous equity portfolio manager for Blackrock investment management company is no stranger to analyzing data.

“Excessive death above and beyond normal death in one year—that’s shocking,” he said.

“Why in year two of a pandemic, was there such a rise to a new high with two vaccines?” he continued. “Why would that age group experience a new high in excess mortality with variants becoming less deadly and virulent?”

Additionally, Dowd along with his insurance analyst partner Josh Stirling found a “mix shift”—or a change in a mix over time—in terms of age of death from old to young.

“Did the virus suddenly decide to mutate and infect younger people?” asked Dowd.

What’s more, Dowd pointed to a Society of Actuaries’ COVID survey (pdf) presented in August of 2022 confirming a study done by he and Stirling that showed there was an 84 percent excess mortality with those people with a group life policy through work.

On Sept. 14, Dowd shared on his Gettr account a report that the group life insured population experienced in ages 25–64 a 140 percent (40 percent really where 100 percent is baseline) excess mortality rate in 2021. That’s while the general U.S. population experienced in ages 15–64 a 131.7 percent excess mortality rate in 2021.

Dowd’s question is this: What happened to the group life insured/employed population to cause the notable outsized 8 percent mortality impact where usually their mortality rate is 30 to 40 percent of the general U.S. population?

He theorized that those employed (and insured) were forced to take the vaccine to maintain their employment while those unemployed had a choice. He pointed to the vaccine as the culprit affecting an otherwise healthy population.

“If you were working, you had no choice,” said Dowd. “Most people took the jab.”

There were massive mandates resulting in the numbers of Americans getting vaccinated, which Dowd concluded caused the spike in deaths and disability compared to what a normal vaccine would.

He cited a federal document that showed from the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine through the March 13, 2021 data cutoff date, there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 of which were in the vaccinated group and 17 in the placebo group. In the report, none of the deaths were considered to be related to the vaccination.

Dowd’s bottom line is as he expressed on his Getty page on September 13: “We had two pandemics. The first was COVID, the second was the “Vaccine.”

Beyond COVID, Isolation and Postponed Medical Care to Blame

Acknowledging Dowd’s findings is well-known physician and biochemist Dr. Robert Malone whose work has focused on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug re-purposing research.

He has previously been criticized in articles by The New York Times and The Washington Post for spreading “misinformation” about the COVID-19 vaccines and has since revealed on his Substack newsletter that he has sued The New York Times for defamation. It was also reported in August by The Epoch Times that he sued the Washington Post, alleging statements in an article about him were defamatory.

“What data clearly supports is what’s concurrent with surge with vaccination campaigning is an odd paradoxical increase with both all-cause mortality and disability claims,” Malone told The Epoch Times. In general, he encourages looking at the fall in life expectancy through an “all-cause mortality” lens.

“All-cause mortality all over the world is incontrovertible,” said Malone, noting the multiple factors involved. “It [the historic decline] could well be part of the surge in all-cause mortality due to a cluster of factors that relate to the impact of the very social policies—the lockdowns, possible deferred standard and diagnostic medical care etc.—that probably set people up for disease and death that would have been avoidable,” he continued.

One of those, said Malone, involves the variety of psychological factors that came into play during the pandemic including lockdowns, people being estranged from families and kids not being able to socialize at school and with friends because of COVID protocols.

“That all equates to stress, suicide, and the big kahuna—drug abuse,” said Malone, noting the psychological and social complications and deferred or longer-term consequences of the virus itself.

The danger of lockdowns in particular was noted in The Great Barrington Declaration where a group of respected infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists addressed their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” recommending an approach called “Focused Protection.” The viewpoint balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity while allowing those at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build immunity through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk, like the elderly.

When it comes to the life expectancy study released last month and its findings, Malone recommends an intellectually rigorous approach. He noted the need to capture the natural data that exists from a variety of different databases to sort out different factors.

Life Expectancy Measured by Year, Demographic

As one of the most common measurements of the overall health of a population, life expectancy is conveyed as the number of years either a newborn baby is expected to live or the expected years remaining for a person at a given age to live. It’s estimated from the death rates in a population.

As shown in the NCHS-CDC study, Native Americans and Alaska Natives were particularly impacted,  their average life expectancy shortened by four years in 2020 and the cumulative decline since the beginning of the pandemic was more than six and half years. While the analysis concluded that COVID-19 drove the majority of the decline, it also noted that a rise in drug overdoses, accidental deaths, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and heart disease contributed.

“It’s not that we say we can expect a baby born in 2020 to live this many years—it’s if mortality continues to look like 2020, then it would have that life expectancy,” said Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral scholar at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology who was the lead author of another study published in January of 2021 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences co-authored by Noreen Goldman.

While Andrasfay’s study found that 2020 presented the largest single-year decline in life expectancy in at least 40 years and that there were extensive racial/ethnic disparities in the mortality impact of COVID-19 (particularly in black and Latino populations), her updated analysis examining both 2020 and 2021 highlighted a continued decline in overall life expectancy. More importantly, more deaths occurred in 2021. Of note, her research looked at all causes together.

“Even though people may have the conception that after the vaccination was widely available mortality decreased, 2021 was overall much worse,” said Andrasfay. “A lot occurred even after the vaccine was widely available so that speaks to a real mortality impact on the U.S.”

She attributed the statistic partly to deaths that occurred before the vaccine was widely available and said her findings showed COVID deaths were the majority of the reason life expectancy was reduced. Her research also showed drug overdose mortality increased a lot in 2020 and 2021.

“On one hand it could be attributed to the pandemic—people using substances more or not able to get treatment like in the past,” said Andrasfay. “At the same time, some experts say it’s really a continuation of trends happening prior to the pandemic.”

While she hasn’t personally studied fentanyl and its use, she did note that a lot of researchers are noting the increased use of the highly powerful synthetic opioid being particularly deadly.

She also noted conditions like heart disease and disruptions to the healthcare system as related to COVID and the sinking mortality rates.

“People were afraid to go to the hospital and didn’t survive things like a heart attack,” said Andrasfay.

Malone also emphasized the pandemic protocols on mental health and deferred medical treatment.

“Part of that drop in life expectancy is due to substance-abuse related events and there’s a suicide component,” he said, noting the stunning surge in suicide among young people as reported by pediatricians. “Substance abuse, mental illness, all of the barriers—people don’t want to go to the doctor any more. Who wants to go to the hospital?”

For his part, Malone also cited the work done by virologist, immunologist, and vaccine expert Theo Schetters in the Netherlands, which backs up the importance of doing analysis on all-cause mortality. According to Schetters in an interview with Malone and Marlies Dekkers of the De Nieuwe Wereld Podcast, symptoms from the mRNA COVID vaccine, which has been found to travel through the body (rather than staying in one part) can potentially have negative effects on different organs in the body.

“That’s why we do analysis on all-cause mortality … if we do not know what is exactly related to vaccination, of course, the coagulation problems, myocarditis, we know that, but there are many more things happening at the moment,” said Schetters. “In the Netherlands, it’s very clear that there is a good correlation between the number of vaccinations that are given to people and the number of people that die within a week after that.”

Using data from the Netherlands’ Central Bureau of Statistics and the National Institute of Health, Schetters noted the more times people are jabbed, the higher chance of death.

“So all-cause mortality is the ultimate indicator for things that we didn’t expect. And that’s why we always have to have it in clinical research,” said Malone.

“We know that it’s not like everybody is dying within a year after you’ve been vaccinated, but a certain percentage of the people have big problems with this,” said Schetters. “The point is that this technology is being sort of introduced as: ‘Now we’ve used it in Corona, it’s accepted.’”

“That’s what we are fighting against, because we say this technology is not mature and maybe it can do something in the future, but we are certainly not at the point now to develop all these other vaccines or variants, like an Omicron variant Corona vaccine with the same technology known, because you didn’t solve that problem,” he continued.

For her part, Andrasfay said she predicts 2022 won’t be as bad as 2021 in terms of life expectancy numbers, but won’t return to 2019 numbers just yet.

“We’ve still seen COVID deaths so that’s already done damage to the 2022 life expectancy measurement,” she said.