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Many Pandemic Deaths Attributed To Natural Causes May Have Actually Been Due To Covid, Study Says

Many deaths that had previously been attributed to natural causes during the first months of the Covid pandemic may actually have been because of the virus.

More than one million deaths during the first 30 months of the pandemic were reported from other natural causes, like disease and chronic conditions, according to the National Institute on Aging. Previous studies found that the excess deaths were higher than reported Covid deaths, but most investigated extra deaths from all causes.

Now, researchers say the timing of these deaths suggests they could have been unrecognized fatalities or indirectly linked to pandemic-related disruptions in health care and in other fields.

A study funded by the institute revealed there were approximately 1.2 million more natural-cause deaths than expected from March 2020 to August 2022 across 3,127 US counties.

Of those deaths, nearly 163,000 did not have a Covid notation on their death certificates.

While more than 1.2 million deaths have been reported with Covid as a contributing cause since the pandemic's start, new research funded by the National Institute on Aging says many early pandemic deaths previously attributed to natural causes may have actually been due to the virus or its impacts. (Getty Images/iStock)

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers found the largest gaps between the excess deaths and Covid deaths were in the rural West and South.

Increases in cases were often correlated with rises in excess natural-cause deaths, the institute said.

"The correlation between COVID-19 deaths and excess natural-cause deaths suggests that health care delays and social and economic impacts of the pandemic were not the main reasons for these excess deaths," it explained.

In areas where there was a greater number of excess deaths assigned to natural causes, there may have been more unrecognized Covid deaths because of a lack of testing, less experienced death investigators, and more deaths occurring outside of medical facilities.

The study, published in the journal PNAS, found New England and mid-Atlantic metropolitan counties had fewer excess natural-cause deaths compared to reported Covid deaths. That's possibly because of declines in other causes of death due to Covid prevention policies, different death reporting standards, or a greater ability to work from home in more economically privileged counties.

A vaccination site was set up at San Francisco's Moscone Center in April 2021. The first Covid vaccine was authorized for emergency use in December 2020 and approved in August 2021. (Getty Images/iStock)

However, there were some limitations to the findings. For example, there's an inability to know for certain if excess natural-cause deaths were due to unrecognized Covid cases or were related to other disruptions from the pandemic. Death counts for 2022 are also still provisional.

"Future research should differentiate unrecognized COVID-19 deaths from other causes and examine the differences based on individual factors, such as age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status, as well as access to health insurance and primary care," the institute said.

"Overall, this study helps improve understanding of the pandemic's true impact and may guide better public health responses and improvements in death investigation systems."

Stanford University Promotes The Anti-public Health Agenda Of The COVID Denialists

Stanford University held a conference last month with the misleading title, "Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past." Given the utter bankruptcy of the US and global policy in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, one would conclude that a discussion on how the world can address the current and future pandemics is of immense importance and has significant relevance to international public health policies.

The conference of public health opponents at Stanford [Photo: Stanford University video]

However, the one-day conference held at the prestigious university was funded through Collateral Global and supported by Brownstone Institute, promoters of pandemic misinformation and COVID-19 contrarians. It was the opposite of a serious discussion on pandemic preparedness.

To place these organizations into a proper perspective, it bears noting that Robert Dingwall, a British sociologist who has been heavily promoted by Collateral Global, wrote on his blog in March 2020 that the elderly would be better off to die from COVID-19 than to be protected and later die from a degenerative disease like dementia. This was a thinly disguised version of fascistic eugenics—weeding out the "unfit" from society.

The Stanford symposium showcased a panel of discredited scientists and supposed policy health experts associated with the reactionary Great Barrington Declaration, better characterized as a manifesto of death, set on promoting the notion that no broad-based public health initiatives should have ever been undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic or when the next pandemic strikes.

At the core of the debunked "declaration" is the claim that there can be "focused protection" against the pandemic for those at high risk, which would allow those at minimal risk of death to lead normal lives while building up immunity to the virus through natural immunity.

Well-respected global health advocate Peter Hotez said of the conference, "This is awful, a full-on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize COVID."

These include discredited figures like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford public policy professor; Dr. Scott Atlas, former Trump administration adviser on the Coronavirus Task Force; and Anders Tegnell, Sweden's former state epidemiologist, who advocated for a policy of mass infection to achieve "herd immunity" that had horrendous consequences on the population, in particular, the elderly and most frail. Tegnell's most consequential remark during the conference gave the flavor of the event: "We have focused so much on mortality as a measure of outcome, but there are more important things."

Included on the panel were Marty Makary, prominent Johns Hopkins University surgeon, who had repeatedly predicted that the population was on the verge of achieving natural immunity and the pandemic would thus come to an end. Also there was Oxford Professor of Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, one of the original signers of the declaration with Bhattacharya, and Harvard University biostatistician Martin Kuldorff.

Graph compares COVID deaths in the US, Sweden and Norway (which adopted a far more rigorous pandemic mitigation program). [Photo: Our World in Data]

Gupta has called for mass infection of the young and declared during the conference that her idea of focused protection had evolved into what she termed "individual risk reduction," where each person would decide for him or herself the level of protection and mitigation they wanted to assume during a deadly outbreak. This is the literal opposite of public health, treating infection with a highly contagious and potentially lethal disease as a purely individual matter.

That institutions like Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Stanford are at the forefront of promoting such anti-science and anti-public health initiatives speaks to the deep political and moral decline in academic circles. Similarly, these "elite" institutions have embraced censorship and attacks on democratic rights of students protesting the US backing of Israel's genocidal policies in Gaza.

Closing remarks at the Stanford conference were given by John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology and one of the principal investigators of the fallacious, non-peer-reviewed Santa Clara County study, released in April 2020, which suggested that COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu and that the pandemic measures to protect populations needed to be lifted forthwith.

At the time of that study, the COVID-19 pandemic was inundating the healthcare system of New York City. The CDC had noted that close to 20,000 people had died in the three-month window (March through May) with an overall crude fatality rate of 9.2 percent. Also, 30 percent of hospitalized patients with laboratory confirmed COVID-19 were known to have died.

Bhattacharya, who had locked arms with AFT President Randi Weingarten in forcing students and teachers back into schools in 2021 and served as a pandemic adviser to Florida's fascistic Governor Ron DeSantis, attempted to sell the conference as a forum for people with opposing views coming together to air out their differences.

"What can we do in the future? The pandemic was by any measure a disaster," he declared. Although he cited the correct number of deaths and economic turmoil caused by the pandemic affecting the poorest in the world, he blamed these losses, not on the failure to carry out systematic public health measures but on the measures themselves. It was a translation into academic jargon of the notorious declaration by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that "the cure can't be worse than the disease."

Bhattacharya had the audacity to assert, "this conference was four years too late, but this is not too late, this is not the last pandemic the world will face." The purpose of his efforts to codify the perspectives put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration is to ensure no real effort is taken by any government to address any threat, including the current bird flu outbreak that threatens to ignite another pandemic.

His ideas have nothing to do with the field of epidemiology or any scientific comprehension of the nature of pandemics. If he has a bone to pick with the Biden administration and its response to the pandemic is that Biden and Harris did not adopt the mass infection policy officially from the beginning, but only implemented it piecemeal.

Additionally, Bhattacharya has positioned himself as a fellow traveler with the anti-vaxxers promoting the false notion that the current mRNA vaccines are unsafe and the process through which they were brought forward violated safety measures which is patently false.

He wrote for the Brownstone Institute a report published on November 16, 2022, stating, "The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population 'safe'."

Scott Atlas [Photo: Stanford University video]

Scott Atlas blurted out the real purpose of the conference. Reading a prepared statement, he said that the lockdowns failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread. He blamed the economic lockdowns for the excess deaths rather than the virus. He blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci for implementing the lockdowns and not enforcing "targeted protection."

Atlas later also called for complete US divestment from the World Health Organization and called for the termination of all middle-level scientists at the CDC, for which he received applause from his colleagues on the panel.

The Stanford conference was entirely divorced from the actual history of the pandemic, particularly its early weeks. The initial outbreak of COVID in Wuhan showed it was propagated by airborne transmission and was both highly contagious and lethal.

When, on January 30, 2020, the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, Europe, the US, and other countries chose not to act. They could have rapidly eliminated and eradicated the virus but did nothing until the virus had spread globally and began its deadly rampage.

It was in early March, six weeks later, with the horrific scenes emerging out of Italy that prompted the working class to demand a shutdown. Auto workers took the lead in many countries, including the United States and Canada, and it was only out of fear of a mass rebellion among workers internationally that the ruling elites were forced to respond with limited lockdowns to stem the tide of infections.

The Great Barrington Declaration, the right-wing campaigns against mask and vaccine mandates and last month's conference at Stanford were essentially rooted in fear of the independent initiative of workers insisting on serious in public health measures. The populist demagogy about allowing people the "freedom" to work in the midst of a deadly pandemic cannot disguise what is a fundamentally anti-working class perspective.

The maliciously false point being driven home by the organizers of the conference was that social interventions—masking, closure of schools and businesses, lockdowns, and maintaining social distancing—were worse than the disease, despite studies that have shown when such policies were actually implemented, they saved many, many lives.

As one 2023 study published in The Lancet found, in the period from January 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022, Hawaii, with stricter anti-COVID measures, saw 147 deaths per 100,000 compared to 581 per 100,000 in Arizona and 526 per 100,000 in Washington D.C. The national rate was 372 deaths per 100,000.

Similar conclusions were reached in a more recent comprehensive study that evaluated state by state in the US comparing restrictions in place and impact on excess deaths. As the authors of that study noted, "COVID-19 restrictions were associated with substantial reductions in excess pandemic deaths in the US. If all states had weak restrictions, as defined in the Methods section, estimated excess deaths from July 2020 to June 2022 would have been 25 percent to 48 percent higher than if all had imposed strong restrictions. Behavioral responses provided a potentially important mechanism for this, being associated with 49 percent 78 percent of the overall difference." This last part of the statement underscores the importance of open channels of communications and an all-in approach to such matters. Public health is first and foremost a social concern.

And still another study published in January 2022 found that the impact of the limited measures employed saved between 870,000 to 1.7 million Americans.

The most insidious issue that the COVID-19 contrarians fail to mention is that herd immunity is not achievable with a virus like SARS-CoV-2, which mutates so rapidly, and the issues raised by Long COVID and reinfections with the concomitant long-term health impacts that will debilitate the population are not even considered. Current estimates place the number of those suffering from Long COVID across the globe at over 410 million as of the end of 2023.

The response to pandemics requires a social investment in public health on an international scale. The global nature of the economy poses that a national approach as was seen in China and its Zero COVID policy cannot withstand an anti-public health policy that is imposed on the global population. This raises the need for a socialist perspective not only to the global economy but to the global health of the working class.

Join the fight to end the COVID-19 pandemic

Someone from the Socialist Equality Party or the WSWS in your region will contact you promptly.

Overdose Deaths Are Rising Among Black And Indigenous Americans

Carlos Santiago, an ambassador and driver for the Greater Hartford Harm Reduction Coalition (now known as the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance), works at a mobile overdose prevention event in 2022 in New Haven, Conn. Nationally, overdose deaths have decreased among white people in recent years but increased among people of color. (Photo courtesy of Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance, formerly known as Greater Hartford Harm Reduction Coalition)

The recent decline in overdose deaths hides a tremendous disparity by race: Deaths have fallen only among white people while continuing to rise among people of color, according to a new Stateline analysis of federal data.

Health experts in nonwhite communities say they're finding strategies that work in their areas, but that they still struggle for recognition and funding to address the problems, especially among Black and Native people.

In all, nearly 5,000 more people of color died from overdoses in 2023 than in 2021, while deaths among white people dropped by more than 6,000, according to the analysis of provisional data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As of early this year, based on partial counts, Black and Native people remain the hardest hit, having earlier in the pandemic surpassed white rates. Hispanic and Asian people are still experiencing more overdose deaths as well.

White people had the highest rate of overdose deaths in 2019, before the pandemic, at 25.4 deaths for every 100,000 people in the U.S. Population. But rates for Black and Native people quickly surpassed white rates and continued to grow as white rates declined between 2021 and 2023. In 2023, the death rates were 49.5 and 39.8 per 100,000 for Black and Native people, respectively.

Tracie Gardner, co-director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network, said Black and Native people often have trouble navigating white-dominated institutions, including many harm reduction agencies. Such agencies need to have more people of color in leadership positions to gain the trust of Black, Native and other people who use drugs, she said.

"It is our contention that Black harm reduction isn't about drug use, it's about the harms of not being a white person in this country," Gardner said. "The only people doing worse or as poorly are Native Americans."

Different trends

Between 2021 and 2023, overdose deaths among white people dropped in all but a dozen states, most of them in the West. But few states saw any decline in deaths among Black or Native American populations. Deaths among Black people did decline, however, in Indiana (-75), the District of Columbia (-29) and Illinois (-22), while deaths among Native people declined in North Carolina (-34), Colorado (-11) and North Dakota (-9).

Connecticut was one of the few states to see a small rate drop among its Black residents. There was no change in the number of overdose deaths, but the Black population grew between 2021 and 2023.

The Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance is working to bring more harm reduction tools to the Black community and others, with 100 mobile kits available at a moment's notice.

Most recently, staff started going to meet people leaving detox programs, also known as withdrawal management, when they choose to leave early and are at especially high risk of overdose.

"The message is, 'Even though this didn't work out, we care about your welfare, we care about your safety, we want to see you come back,'" said Mark Jenkins, the alliance's executive director.

Too few services are specifically designed for the Black community, Jenkins said, even though data shows that the overdose crisis is hitting that population the hardest.

"We know that this disproportionately affects people of color, and we're right out there where people need to see us," he said of his organization's approach. "A lot of our people don't access services if they're not right there in their path."

A lack of funding

The overdose death numbers for American Indian and Native Alaskan people may be even higher than the Stateline analysis indicates, because Native people often are misidentified in death certificates, said Philomena Kebec, an attorney and member of the Wisconsin-based Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

"These numbers about the impact on tribal and Alaska Native individuals are really stark," Kebec told Stateline.

Many tribes struggle to provide overdose-halting naloxone and other medications because of chronic underfunding for health services, Kebec, who also is a fellow on addiction and overdose at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said on a Brookings Institution podcast last month.

But increasingly, tribes are turning to mobile programs not unlike Connecticut's. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon is adapting buses to help people get methadone and buprenorphine that help curb opioid withdrawal symptoms.

Kebec said in an interview that her own tribe in Wisconsin began a mail-order naloxone program using private donations, but added it could do more with state funding that has yet to be approved.

"We have programming that's really keyed into how things have to happen in rural communities. We have a lot of people who have transportation issues, so we have to come to them," she said.

Tribes and helpers need more funding for research to find root causes and more timely information from hospitals to find overdose outbreaks quickly and intervene, she said. It's a need everywhere, but means even more in Native communities, which are often spread out in rural areas.

In the Black community, men older than 55 are especially hard hit, said Gardner, of the National Black Harm Reduction Network. She noticed their deaths start to increase in the mid-2010s, when she served as New York state's assistant secretary of health, and later realized those deaths were "the canary in the coal mine" that signaled deadly fentanyl's infiltration into supplies of other drugs.

It is our contention that Black harm reduction isn't about drug use, it's about the harms of not being a white person in this country.

– Tracie Gardner, co-director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network

During the pandemic, "older [Black] men lost their communities, their family supports. There are some men who became homeless and there was no safety network," Gardner said. "Plus, men still associate going out and getting health care with a woman's thing. A lot of care is geared to women."

Dr. Edwin Chapman, a District of Columbia physician whose practice serves many older Black men who use drugs, said that like others trying to help Black and Native people, he's had trouble getting funding. His innovations include early use of buprenorphine to curb opioid cravings.

"There has been more pushback from local officials than help," Chapman said.

Stateline originally published this article. Like the Alaska Beacon, Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.Org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

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