The Fiction of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome – Evidence from the States

A round-up of circumstantial evidence of destructive public policy and destructive private mandates

In my last piece, I reported that mortality data from the CDC give us clues about the mystery of non-COVID excess mortality.  Most notably, young people made it through the first big wave of COVID unscathed, but it was months after that first wave had burned through the population that excess mortality among younger people started to edge upwards.  If young people had managed to shake off the most virulent manifestation of COVID (COVID Classic), why would fatalities start increasing months later?

More puzzling is the fact that excess mortality among the youngest and healthiest edged up to an even higher level just as the campaign to get everyone vaccinated really got going.  Yet more puzzling is the fact that excess mortality among these people has remained elevated. 

The establishment media blows off these inconvenient facts by fabricating the fiction of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome”: Yes, there are these puzzling fatalities among young, healthy people, but the absolute numbers are not so large; the media invite us to dismiss this phenomenon as no big deal. 

Then there is the evidence of stubbornly elevated excess mortality of people prime working age.  These people did suffer some number of COVID fatalities in the early going, but, just as COVID fatalities among older people reverted to zero, these people continued to suffer high rates of mortality.  Something other than COVID was going on.

In this essay I illuminate more clues about what was going on.  Again, I examine excess mortality by age cohorts, but I also break the numbers by state.  I will concentrate most attention on the states of Florida, California and New York. I then close by recounting the big reasons for doubting the official COVID narrative.

A preview of the results:

• Quite memorably, the COVID phenomenon first became most spectacularly and obviously manifest in New York City. 

  — By late March, raw counts of COVID fatalities among older New Yorkers (45 and older) started to mount sharply, especially among the very oldest New Yorkers (aged 86 and older). 

  — But, there is even some evidence that COVID dipped into the ranks of people of prime working age (25-44). 

  — The youngest New Yorkers (aged 0-24) escaped harm.  Indeed, the youngest cohort had entered the first big COVID wave with relatively high excess mortality, but rates of mortality plummeted among these youngest people just as they began to shoot up for everyone else.

  — And, yet, excess mortality among the youngest New Yorkers started to edge up assertively just after the COVID wave started to recede.  What was going on?

  — Excess mortality among these youngest New Yorkers then remained stubbornly elevated with the running average simmering just below 10% over the next two years.

  — Meanwhile, people of prime working age (25-44) may have been affected by that first COVID wave, but, surprisingly, excess mortality among such people has remained stubbornly elevated over the next two years even as it declined for older New Yorkers.  The all-time average has ranged between the shockingly high rates of 26% and 31% over the following few years.

Keep the optics in mind here.  Shockingly high and stubborn rates of excess mortality in the younger cohorts may be easy to ignore, because the absolute numbers of fatalities among younger people may not be so high relative to the absolute number of total fatalities in a given year.  Most people who die are much older people.  That’s just the way of the world, obviously.  But, examining the smaller numbers of fatalities of younger people relative to the expected numbers of fatalities among younger people (which are also small numbers), makes the tragedy of elevated excess mortality obvious.  One just has to look at things through the right lens.

Other results:

• Florida may have missed that first wave of COVID that had inundated New York, but COVID started to take its toll among older people (45 and older) starting in July 2020. 

• Even so, excess mortality among younger people (0-44) started to increase sharply in the months before COVID really started to affect Florida.  Something was going on, and it had nothing to do with COVID.

• It is not obvious that vaccinations mitigated COVID infections.  The peak of the first wave of vaccinations in April 2021 fell between peaks in fatalities of older Floridians in January 2021 and September 2021.  The second peak in vaccinations in December 2021 followed the September peak in fatalities.  Fatalities among older Americans then peaked again February 2022.  Did the vaccinations make any positive difference?

• Excess mortality among younger people (0-24 and 25-44) started to inflect upwards just as the first wave of vaccinations reached its peak in April 2021.  Vaccinations thus have the appearance of inducing mortality among younger people rather than mitigating mortality.

  —   Excess mortality among the youngest cohort (0-24) remained elevated for the next year-and-a-half.

  —   The cohort of people of prime working age (25-44) started to perform worse than all other cohorts just as vaccinations started to approach their first peak.

Then there is California:

• The youngest cohort (0-24) has performed far worse in California than in New York and Florida with excess mortality having averaged more than 16% from the beginning of 2020 through June 4, 2022.  In New York and Florida, the youngest cohorts have clocked in at 9% and 11 %, respectively, as of June 4, 2022.

• Similarly, the cohort of of people of prime working age (25-44) has performed far worse in California than in New York or Florida.

• Overall, Florida has performed a little better than the national average as of June 4, 2022, and New York has performed a little better than that.  California has performed a few points worse than the national average.

• The border states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have each performed 4 to 5 points worse than the national average as of June 4, 2022.  As border states, they have had to absorb millions of illegal aliens and put up with prodigious streams of fentanyl coming across the border.  Does that have something to do with elevated mortality?

The first point to establish is that non-COVID excess mortality is an important phenomenon.  The following graph indicates weekly excess mortality (in absolute numbers of fatalities) for the United States from the beginning of 2020 through June 4, 2022:

The red line indicates the number of vaccine doses administered in a given week.  The yellow area indicates excess mortality if we were to ignore all fatalities attributed to COVID (“with COVID”).  The grey area and yellow area together indicate excess mortality.  What do we see?

We can all worry about the integrity of the process of assigning causes of death.  Indeed, we might worry most about the over-reporting of COVID fatalities, but, even if such bias were at work in the CDC data, those same data make plain that we cannot attribute all excess mortality to COVID.  At the same time, however, it would be wrong to not attribute some share of COVID fatalities to the excess, meaning that COVID really did take away some volume of people who would have lived to see another season or two.  But, at the same time, some volume of those people would not have lived to see another season, anyway.  COVID concentrated its toll on the immunosuppressed, on just the same people who would have been least likely to live much longer.  Harsh, but true.

Meanwhile, the fact that a lot of non-COVID mortality shows up in the excess means just that: a lot of the excess was driven by factors other than COVID itself.  It is hard not to conclude that poor public policy inflicted enormous harm.  What makes that non-COVID harm all the worse is that it would tend to be concentrated on younger, rather than older, people.  It would be concentrated on people who would have had the most high-quality living yet to look forward to.  But, we ignore those fatalities and instead fetishize COVID fatalities.  We treat COVID fatalities as if they would not have occurred absent COVID—as if people live forever absent COVID.  It’s really pretty silly.

Note another strange feature.  Excess mortality has only turned negative by March 2022, nearly two years after the first wave of COVID started to become obviously manifest.  Why hadn’t it gone negative much earlier and then reverted to zero?

Going negative is something we would expect with a virus that mostly takes away people who are most susceptible to infection.  These are the same people who tend to not have much time left in this world.  Thus, succumbing to COVID in one season would amount to not succumbing to some other respiratory infection or to some other condition of old age in the next season.  Taking away a sizable volume of people who would have died over the course of the next year by other causes should thus induce excess mortality to go negative in that next year.  And that is what we see when we look at the oldest Americans.  Excess mortality among the oldest cohort (86 and older) went sharply negative by March 2021.  (This is pictured in the previous essay.)  But then it increased again.  Had COVID not already burned through the entire population and taken its toll?  Or was something else contributing to excess mortality after the spring of 2021? 

The data do not dispel the possibility that that other “something else” could include the negative effects of vaccines.  Note the peaks in vaccine uptake and excess mortality do not align with each other.  The first peak in vaccine uptake lags the biggest peak in excess mortality by three months.  Excess mortality was just about zero when vaccine uptake hit its first peak.  Did the vaccines have any effect on mortality?

The second peak in vaccine update lags the following peak in excess mortality by three months.  Again, vaccine uptake lags mortality.  So, which process lags or leads the other.  Or do vaccines have little effect, positive or negative, on total mortality?

One thing we can definitely say is that the vaccines did not operate as advertised.  They were supposed to eradicate COVID and bring excess mortality to zero or even below zero.  That did not happen, and we await a proper investigation.  Instead, what we had gotten thus far was the official narrative, which was: Evidence of continued COVID fatalities amounted to a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.  But the authorities never afforded access to data which would have enabled us to assess the claim. 

Access to individual-level data would have enabled us to conduct off-the-shelf analyses of individualized “hazard rates”.  Such analysis might have substantiated or (we can guess) dispelled the pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated narrative.  We can guess that we would have found what the data, such as they are, suggest: The vaccines may have actually induced affirmative harm whether by inducing “adverse effects,” as vividly illustrated in the VAERS data, or inducing greater susceptibility to COVID infection by complex mechanisms that go by names like “antibody-dependent enhancement” (ADE).  Interest in debunking the ADE hypothesis seems to have peaked in August 2021, but ADE is a generic phenomenon that has been recognized long before COVID showed up, and since August 2021, the aspiring debunkers have been relatively quiet.

The horse race between the states –

Let’s now examine excess mortality (in % terms) by selected states.  Specifically, let’s look how excess mortality accumulated over time starting at the beginning of 2020.  The following graph features cumulative excess mortality (which can be negative) for the states of California, Florida and New York.  I also include “United States,” which basically amounts to average of performance across all states.

Excess mortality in the United States was effectively zero before COVID started to make itself obvious.  By the middle of May 2020, New York had experienced fatalities nearly 23% in excess of expected, benchmark mortality.  Over the following months, that excess diminished, and by June 4, 2022, New York has experienced mortality 13% in excess of benchmark mortality over the entire interval January 2020 through June 4, 2022.

Meanwhile, Florida clocks in at 13.6% as of June 4, 2022, the United States as a whole clocks in at 13.8%, and California lags the bunch at 14.8%.  But, note that performance across these three states has converged over time.  That’s what we might expect once COVID has burned its way through the entire population: performance should converge.

But, there are outliers.  Hawaii (not pictured) has performed better than all other states in that it clocks in at 5.2% as of June 2022, and Arizona lags all states, except Alaska, by clocking in at 19.0%  That makes for broad dispersion in performance.  So, three sets of questions.  First, why has Hawaii been able to perform so much better than all other states?  Perhaps sealing it off from outside traffic really did make a difference.  Perhaps COVID has yet to burn its way entirely through that population.  Second, why has Arizona performed so poorly?  Does being a border state have something to do with it?  Was much excess mortality induced by the strains of putting up with unmitigated illegal immigration across the southern border?  Third, why has the performance of no states reverted to zero excess mortality by June 2022?  Hawaii may have performed best of all states, but it has still experienced appreciably high excess mortality.  Something else has been going on.

I reproduce the previous graph, but this time I add Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.  Note that these three border states cluster together.  The fact that they cluster would be consistent with the idea that the fact that they are all border states is an important factor in their performances.  Absent further analysis, it would be hard not to conclude that the inchoate policy of shutting everything down while yet opening the border to any and all illegal migrants would have some influence on the performance of the border states.  Some volume of migrants will have been carrying disease into the country, and opening the border will also have encouraged (and did encourage) the scourge of illegal drug trade.  Drugs and disease may have imposed a disproportionately high death toll on the border states.

New York –

Let’s dig in to the age distribution of excess mortality in New York.

The performance of the oldest cohort (86 and older) looks much like what one might expect.  Excess mortality was high, then it went negative.  It spiked again, but then went more negative.  Finally, it peaked yet a third time, but went even more negative.

This business of going negative is consistent with COVID taking away the people most susceptible to fatal infections, and it looks like excess mortality across all age cohorts has reverted to nearly zero (finally) after more than two years.  But, if we examine excess mortality in proportional (%) terms, we see that excess mortality has remained stubbornly elevated across all age cohorts.  We can also discern clues that something other than COVID had been driving mortality.  Consider the following graph:

This graph features the ratio of excess mortality by age cohort (summed up from the beginning of 2020 to all points through June 4, 2022) to benchmark mortality (also summed up from the beginning of 2020).  The graph thus indicates something of a horse race between age cohorts.  And note that there is much diversity in performance.  The oldest cohort and the youngest cohort have been racing neck-and-neck through the first six months of 2022.  They have both clocked in below 10%.  People of prime working age (25-44) have performed the worst (by far).  By June 2022, excess mortality in this cohort is still about 30%.  That is a very big number.

Note than all age cohorts, excepting the youngest cohort, was affected by the first COVID wave.  But, just as all those people were succumbing to COVID, mortality among the youngest people was dropping.  Younger people were shaking COVID off.  But then mortality among those youngest people started to increase.

I submit that that pattern—declining mortality in the face of COVID and increasing mortality just as the first COVID wave recedes—provides vivid evidence that something really strange is going on.  Why should young people be dying at all at elevated rates?  The authorities do not have an answer for that.

I also submit that stubbornly high rates of mortality for people of prime working age (25-44) is also evidence of something else going on.  Usual suspects would include the strains of lockdown and strains of putting up with mandates.

California –

California seems to have escaped that first wave of COVID, but COVID caught up with it by July 2020, and things got worse in early 2021.

Young people seemed to have mostly shaken off that big COVID wave in early 2021, but excess mortality among such people was already running very high.  What was going on?

Most striking of all is the egregiously poor performance of people of prime working age (25-44).  Excess mortality among such people exceeded 35% by early 2021, and it had yet to come down below 35% by June 2022.

For younger people (0-24 and 25-44) California looks like a death trap compared to New York.  It also looks like a death trap across all age cohorts compared to Florida.

Florida –

Like California, Florida mostly dodged that first wave of COVID that devastated New York City, and, like California, it started to rack up COVID fatalities in July 2020.  But, note that excess mortality among the youngest people had become elevated before July 2020.  While it subsequently moderated somewhat, it then increased to about 10%. 

Something other than COVID had been victimizing young people before COVID first showed up, and that same other “something” continued to victimize these people.  Again, usual suspects would include vaccines mandates at the schools and universities and the closures of the schools and universities.

People of prime working age (25-44) perform much, much better in Florida than in either California or New York, but they still clock in at a distressing high 23% by June 2022.  Usual suspects would include the strains of dismissals from work (for people not willing to go along with vaccine mandates) as well as the strains of mandates on those people who remained employed.

Circumstantial evidence of destructive public policy and private vaccine mandates –

Circumstantial evidence is unsatisfying for obvious reasons.  We may see obvious clues and correlations, but we would really like to develop evidence than mechanically links the usual suspects to mortality.  That said, what kinds of evidence do we have after more than two years of COVID policy?

• VAERS has served its purpose, which is to send vivid signals that something bad is happening.  But the authorities have chosen to blow off those signals.

• Anecdotal evidence of “sudden” deaths among young people has proven to be so inconvenient that the authorities have had to assemble a narrative of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” to counter the evidence.

• The authorities have also had to assemble the narrative, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” to cover for phenomena that look a lot like ADE.

• Young people shook off the first and most virulent wave of COVID, but then they started to experience stubbornly elevated excess mortality.  The rate increased with vaccinations and remained elevated.  Something other than COVID was going on.

• People of prime working age did experience some COVID mortality in the early going, but then their rates of excess mortality reached extremely high rates.  These rates increased with vaccinations and remain stubbornly elevated.

• Excess mortality for younger cohorts almost never went negative.  COVID may have taken away the small number of severely immunocompromised people in the younger cohorts, but something other than COVID has been contributing to the mortality of healthy people who would otherwise have had much high-quality living yet to do.

• We would expect excess mortality to go negative, especially for the oldest cohorts.  We do see some vivid evidence of that, but we would also expect to see excess mortality to eventually revert to zero.  Are we only now seeing it revert to zero more two years after the advent of COVID?

• The vaccines did not work as advertised.  They were supposed to make people immune.  They did not. They should have made excess mortality go to zero or go negative.  They did not.

None of this evidence is going to convince the True Believers.  Never mind that the True Believers are concentrated at the schools, the universities, and in public office.  They are concentrated among the self-anointed best-and-brightest.  But, it is up to rest of us to collectively share ideas and evidence with each other and to speak up… Or, at least, to not live in lies.

Easy to do, perhaps, for people like myself who have not had to submit to vaccine mandates or other mandates in order to hold on to his livelihood.  Were I a younger person, I may have had to put up with those things.  But, we are seeing more self-avowed people of the Left rediscovering “individual rights” in our increasingly pseudo-optimized, hyper-regulated age.  The same may be true of self-avowed “conservatives”.  Will new coalitions of people on the left and right manage to push back against the central authorities?  Are we already seeing evidence of the push back?

Keep talking.  Agree and disagree.  Show up and protest.  Jam for Freedom.  Be free.