The Concerning Jump in Mortality in the Under 50s
I don’t often advertise that I’m an actuary. It’s usually because people don’t know what an actuary is (an expert in analyzing risk and mortality usually involved with insurance or pension funds) or if they do, it comes with a rather nerdy label. But these days I’m more reluctant to be associated with the actuarial profession due to its failure to speak out and raise the alarms about the catastrophic rise in mortality of young people since 2021. It has taken Edward Dowd, an analyst and money manager, formerly of Blackrock, the huge asset managers, to speak out. And he has done so eloquently and convincingly in his book “Cause Unknown” The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022.
Ed never asks us to take his word for anything he is pointing out or explaining. He provides links to the original source material throughout, via URLs for those of us reading on an electronic device as well as QR codes for those reading a hard copy. He challenges every one of us to be curious and think more deeply about what has transpired and where we go from here.
Starting off with a compendium of reported deaths in healthy young athletes across the world is powerful. Ed includes photos, the news headline and a link to the news report. This drives home the real people behind the statistics and the tragedy of it all. He then goes into the analysis of just how unusual the high number of athlete deaths are by comparing the statistics to past studies of athletes over various previous decades.
Ed then moves onto young people who unexpectedly died in their sleep with a similar compendium of photos and news stories. The saddest part here is the media trying to distract us from facts with the invention of a new syndrome, SADS, for “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” which is not actually an explanation but just a category of people who were too young and apparently healthy to die.
There are other compendiums for healthy young doctors and nurses who have died and young famous people also.
A society is dependent on the strength of its working population. I have spent my career focused on this group who are proven scientifically to be the healthiest among us – in the past. Group Life insurance rates (secured by employers) are significantly lower than the rates you could get as an individual specifically based on this premise of being healthy enough to work full time. The compelling evidence that a medical intervention and the healthcare industry itself is to blame for this turnaround is a staggering revelation.
In the actuarial world of insurance, a 1% movement in mortality year over year would get attention, a 5% change would get a lot of senior management freaking out. A 40% increase in deaths is “literally earth-shaking” to quote Ed and for the millennial age-group 25-44 the data is showing a breathtaking 84% increase in deaths over the average (very stable) baseline for 2021.
Helpfully Ed doesn’t start to analyze what might be causing the spike in deaths until some way into the book but then clearly sets out what so many media outlets have chosen to ignore, that the single biggest factor that affected the working population more than any other during 2021 and 2022 was vaccine mandates. Ed goes as far to say “being employed in 2021 was actually detrimental to your health”. Instead of jumping to conclusions though he carefully walks through the evidence that vaccines did not stop transmission nor prevent hospitalizations and death, but did cause very real and far more common adverse effects than the media would lead us to believe.
The Society of Actuaries (SOA) in the US did actually publish their Covid19 Mortality Survey Report in August 2022 using data from Group Life policies which confirms these findings. Ed includes a summary and links to this report as well as several other independent sources. I commend the SOA for the report although it is sad how they have “buried the lead” by downplaying the correlation between vaccination rates and mortality and the fact that only 13% of excess deaths were found to be due to Covid19 itself. The vast majority were heart and circulatory problems and what are now known as “turbo-cancers” identified as side-effects of the vaccines.
Some of the most stunning data displayed by Ed is that from the UK Office of National Statistics with week-by-week data by age group. It is particularly sad to see that while deaths of children actually fell during 2020 due to the fact it is almost unheard of for children to die of Covid19 but lockdowns reduced the number of accidents (the more typical cause of death for the under 18s), in 2021 deaths started to rise in exactly the same week the vaccines rolled out for this group. There was a similar trend for every age group in line with the phased roll out.
Data from other countries is included such as Denmark who quietly stopped vaccinating the under 50s as soon as they saw the information, and other European countries who have made their data available, all showing similar stories.
Ed then goes into the disabilities which are also part of this story of a diminishing healthy workforce. First with the news stories to drive the point home, and then with the data.
The book is short and focused though you can spend many hours going into all the linked information. Bravo to Edward Dowd for the innovative way he has laid out the evidence to make it accessible and understandable to anyone. This is an urgent read.
