Mixed Signals on Health

The US has surpassed all other nations in its rate of infant death. It had the highest rate of new AIDS cases. American young people were more likely than their international peers to die in traffic accidents.

As of 2019, the US ranked 36th in the world in terms of life expectancy at birth, behind Slovenia and Costa Rica, not to mention Canada, Japan, and all the rich countries in Europe.  (1)

Recent research indicates that although white people living in the nation’s highest income counties have better health outcomes than the average US citizen, even they fare worse on infant mortality, maternal mortality, and deaths after heart attacks than the average citizens of Norway, Denmark, and other developed countries. (2)

In retrospect, these reports were a harbinger of things to come, and many experts now say it foreshadowed the US experience with Covid-19. “The abysmal performance of the US—leading the world in death counts and unable to mount the kind of national response that so many peer nations achieved—adds a fresh twist to the US health disadvantage,” said Steven Woolf, a physician and public health researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University.

His research team was convened to find out why the US suffers the ‘health disadvantage’ that it documented but it was unable to do so. Common explanations—obesity, lack of access to health care, health disparities between white and black people—were all at play, but the exact cause, or combination of causes, was not clear.

The troubling portrait of America’s health did not spur action to paint a better one. Two presidential administrations have ignored it, as has Congress, mirroring a lack of interest shown by the wider public. Still, some social scientists have not stopped asking: What’s causing the US health disadvantage?  Recent work points to a surprising culprit: conservative politics.  (1)

This idea stems from a new line of research focusing on individual states, rather than the country as a whole, which has found that states with more liberal policies have longer life expectancy rates than those with more conservative policies. If all states adopted policies similar to those of Hawaii, for example—including on labor, tobacco, and the environment—US life expectancy would increase to such an extent that it would be on a par with other high income countries, according to Jennifer Karas Montez, a sociologist at Syracuse University and lead author of the new research. (3)

White House Ignores the Problem

What does the White House think of this  ‘health disadvantage’?  White House domestic climate adviser Gina McCarthy said recently that climate change poses the ‘most significant public health challenge of our time,’ so they are totally ignoring the statistics that show the US is in very poor shape ‘health wise’ compared to the rest of the world. (4)

New data show that global climate related death risk has dropped by over 99%  since 1920. Despite the near constant caterwauling from climate alarmists that we are in a ‘climate emergency’, real world data, released at the end of 2020 show that climate related deaths are now approaching zero. The data spans 100 years of ‘global warming’ back to 1920 and shows ‘climate related’ deaths are now approaching zero. (5)

Bjorn Lomborg reports, “Back in the 1920s, the death count from climate related disasters was 485,000 on average each year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,357 dead per year or 96% lower. In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the preliminary number of dead was even lower at 8,086, some 98% lower than the 1920s average.”

But because the world’s population also quadrupled at the same time, the climate related ‘death risk’ has dropped even faster. The death risk is the probability of you dying in any one year. In the 1920s, it was 243 out of a million people that would die from climate related disasters. In the 2020s, the risk was just 2.5 per million people, a drop of 99%. In 2020, the preliminary number is 1 per million, 99.6% lower. (5)

So, lets not be concerned that the US ranks 36th in the world in terms of life expectancy at birth, behind Slovenia and Costa Rica, not to mention Canada, Japan, and all the rich countries in Europe, and try to fix the issue. The real threat is the bogeyman climate change. Ignore the data that show we have a real health problem that we are not attacking.

References

  1. Lola Butcher, “Why are Americans so unhealthy?”, realclearscience.com, February 2, 2021
  2. Ezekiel J. Emanuel et al., “Comparing health outcomes of privileged US citizens with those of average residents of other developed     countries,” JAMA Intern. Med., December 28, 2020
  3. Jennifer Karas Montez et al., “US state policies, politics and life expectancy,” milbank.org, September 2020
  4. Morgan Phillips. “What about Covid-19? Biden aide says climate change most significant public health challenge of our time.”     foxnews.com, January 27, 2021
  5. Anthony Watts, “After 100 years of climate change, ‘climate related deaths’ approach zero,” climaterealism.com, Jamuary 2, 2020

About the author: Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has written for The American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, Hawaii Reporter and Canada Free Press.

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Comments (2)

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    Herb Rose

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    I find it hard to believe that conservative politics is a cause when most of excess deaths cited (obesity, drug abuse, violence, infant and maternal mortality traffic accidents, …) are far more prevalent in large cities (Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington DC New York, Atlanta, etc.) where liberal politics has been in control for decades.

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    K Kaiser

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    Hello Jack Dini, and commentator Herb Rose,

    Yes, both of you are right:
    – Lives lost due to traffic accidents (etc.) are far more prevalent than most people are aware of..
    – “Climate change” is largely a ruse to foster a “globalist” agenda without any understanding of the real cause/effect relationships.
    – Carbon dioxide (“carbon”) emissions have no significant effect on the globe’s climate.

    Reply

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