A calamity of lost youth

According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics’ data (rounded to the nearest thousand), in 2023 581,000 people died in the UK. This was 4.5 per cent below the figure for 2020, the first year of the pandemic, when 607,000 people passed away, and only 2,000 fewer than died in 2021 (the year of the second wave and Omicron). In 2019, for comparison, 517,000 people died. This data is stark: even accounting for demographic changes and population growth, the number of deaths in 2023 in the UK was similar to 2020, virtually the same as in 2021, and 12.5 per cent above 2019 levels.

Beyond the overall mortality figures, excess mortality estimates produced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are alarming. Canada saw two weeks in the middle of 2023 where the excess death rate was measured at over 30 per cent. France and the Netherlands have each seen weeks with excess deaths of over 50 per cent. Meanwhile, European Union data for October 2023 shows that excess deaths in Cyprus, Finland, the Netherlands, and Ireland were all over 15 per cent: Finland’s was 19.8 per cent, while all four countries had also seen rates over ten per cent in the previous month. Mortality thus remains a problem almost as severe as it was during the pandemic.

One industry which has taken note of this trend is insurance. With premiums and payouts linked to mortality trends, insurance executives need to be up to date. The industry magazine Insurance News reported last October that mortality has increased by about seven per cent since before covid. In contrast to the covid era, the figures are much higher in younger than in older people. A report from the American Society of Actuaries Research Institute from November 2023 showed that in the second quarter of 2023, excess deaths in the US were running at 26 per cent in the 35-44 age bracket, and at15-26 per cent for all ages up to 55. However, mortality was more or less as expected in older age brackets.

The evidence is overwhelming: a calamity is affecting young people in many countries around the world.

Working out what is happening is the easy part. The question of why it is happening raises a whole set of different issues. One reason that investigating current levels of mortality is so difficult is that the answers circulating usually depend on the researcher’s approach to the pandemic itself. Some, like Easthope, believe this long tail of mortality was inevitable: they put it down to the link between societal and physical health, and the impacts of postponed diagnoses during the pandemic focus on covid alone.

On the other hand, those who recognised covid as a serious threat often attribute these deaths only to covid. Those who were heavily critical of the lockdown response blame the impacts of lockdown. And those who saw the lockdown as a conspiracy to promote the biosecurity state generally point the finger at the vaccine. Confirmation bias is strong, which makes it much harder to work out what is happening.

First, it’s important to assess the causes of these premature deaths. Cardiovascular issues are significant. In June last year, the British Heart Foundation said that since 2020 there had been 100,000 excess deaths in England from cardiac issues. In December, the Daily Mail reported a notable increase in deaths from heart attacks among young people. In July, meanwhile, doctors from Los Angeles reported a 29% jump in heart attacks among those aged 25-44 from 2020 to 2021.

Another crucial element is that there are wide regional variations. European Union data shows that while there were significant excess deaths in western Europe late in 2023, the opposite holds true in eastern Europe: countries such as Bulgaria, Lithuania and Romania are seeing between four and ten per cent fewer deaths than expected. Meanwhile, deaths in Mexico returned to their pre-pandemic levels in 2022.

All this indicates that a wide range of factors must be considered. However, polarised approaches to the pandemic are often reproduced in online debate. Those who have systematically focused on the harms caused by the covid virus tend to attribute the continuing high mortality to virus impacts on the cardiovascular system. Research published in February 2023 suggested that covid appreciably increased risks of cardiovascular disease, and scientists at Johns Hopkins University have also claimed that infection from covid can damage the heart.

Yet covid on its own cannot explain the current situation. There is no clear mechanism to explain why covid infection especially harms younger people, who show the largest rates of excess mortality. Moreover, given the extreme variability of mortality rates between western and eastern Europe, it’s unclear why people in some countries should be more prone to this causal connection than others.

Then there are the lockdown critics who believe the stress and lifestyle changes caused by social restrictions to be the primary cause of excess deaths. Some of these researchers point to a similar paradigm in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s: in this case, the collapse of a pre-existing societal framework (communism) also saw a huge increase in cardiovascular-linked mortality. Moreover, with Sweden’s excess death rate among the lowest in the OECD, its refusal to enforce lockdown could have shaped this outcome. But lockdowns alone cannot explain this pattern: Sweden’s excess death rate is much higher than that in eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Lithuania, all of which did have lockdowns.

Finally, there’s a large body of material online claiming that this increase in mortality in the young has been caused by the covid vaccines. This material is usually produced by those who saw covid lockdown policies as part of a “great reset” engineered by the World Economic Forum. This argument points to the spike in excess deaths in the young which began in spring 2021, alongside the vaccine rollout – and also to an acknowledged connection between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis in young people. This risk is generally deemed very low, although one peer-reviewed study in the journal Vaccine put adverse reactions to these vaccines at one in 800 people.