The Role of Opioids Generating the 'Pandemic'
Never let a crisis go to waste!
Millennials and Gen Xers died at alarmingly high rates during the deadliest year of the pandemic countermeasures, but for ages 30-39 less than a third of these excess deaths are attributed to COVID-19 (Graph 1).
Graph 1: Excess deaths are calculated by multiplying the increase in death rate by the age group population recorded in 2021. Surplus or deficit deaths due to demographic changes are calculated by subtracting the excess deaths from total increase in deaths. Raw values are compiled on the following sources: Our Changing Population: US. USA Facts. https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/?endDate=2021-01-01&startDate=2010-01-01, Annual death rate by age group, United States. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-death-rate-by-age-group?time=2006, Annual deaths by age group, United States. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-deaths-by-age?time=2010&country=~USA, COVID Deaths by Year. The Global Statistics. https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/covid-deaths-by-year/
In addition, death rates in these age groups had already been trending upwards by 2014 (Graph 2), but the largest increase occurred after the pandemic had been declared (dotted lines in Graphs 3 and 4).
Graph 2: M. Barbieri. Contribution of Drug-Related Deaths to the US Disadvantage in Mortality. International Journal of Epidemiology 48(3) 2019: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/48/3/945/5265302?login=false
Graph 3: These numbers are derived from calculations based on data from the Actuarial Life Table of the US Social Security Administration https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
Graph 4: These numbers are calculated from raw data from the Actuarial Life Table of the US Social Security Administration https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
Unsurprisingly, data from the CDC indicates that these age groups were disproportionately affected by drug overdoses in 2019 and 2020 (Graph 5).
Graph 5: Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 1999–2020. CDC Data Briefs Number 428. December 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db428.htm
The pandemic-associated surge in the death rate is correlated with a reported spike in fentanyl deaths that started in 2020 (Graph 6).
Why did overdose deaths coincide with the “pandemic”?
Are government experts paying attention?
Graph 6: Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 1999–2020. CDC Data Briefs Number 428. December 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db428.htm
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s appointment as director of NIH was celebrated by conservatives who regard him one of the “good guys” due to his role in the Great Barrington Declaration. The venerable economist/epidemiologist recently made the rounds to discuss the recent decline in US life expectancy. Notably absent from these interviews and speeches was the role of opioids. In one particularly egregious appearance, Bhattacharya expressed concerns over censorship, loss of trust in public health, impediments to scientific progress, and (most egregiously) compares 'failures' in the Biomedical space to 'failures' in Silicon Valley.* Is he paving the way for personalized medicine?
Hanlon’s razor cautions us not to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence, but Occam’s razor teaches us how to rule out the convoluted BS excuses that are often deployed in order to obscure the simple truths; like blaming life expectancy decline on “chronic disease” and an (alleged) “novel virus” that increased the death rate of elderly Americans by a measly 10-20% during its worst year. This was not an oversight: 12 years ago Bhattacharya was first author on a paper attributing Russia’s 1990-1994 surge in the death rate to the demise of Gorbachev’s anti-alcoholism campaign of 1985-1988 (Graph 7). In view of his prior expertise on the relationship between death rate and substance abuse, there is no way Dr. Bhattacharya’s failure to link opioid deaths to changes in US life expectancy can be credibly attributed to “incompetence”.
Graph 7: J. Bhattacharya et al. The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia’s Mortality Crisis. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5(2) 2013: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3818525/
Cui Bono? Who benefits when opioid deaths are disassociated from life expectancy? According to this chart from Our World in Data, the two most prominent dips in US life expectancy occurred during 1916-1918 and 2020-2021 (Graph 8). Attributing a substantive portion of the 2020-2021 decline to opioids poses a grave threat to the pandemic psy-op and Bhattacharya knows this. This sin of omission makes Bhattacharya no better than his predecessor, Francis ‘parents-should-wear-masks-at-home’ Collins.
Graph 8: Life Expectancy 1901-2023 from Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
The US has by far the world’s highest death rate from opioids, and even if this epidemic was not government-engineered, the timing was remarkably convenient for narrative curators who exploited it to inflate the COVID-19 body count.
Truth is the first casualty of war, and in the war for your mind you need to be wary of algorithm-generated heroes scripted to mislead people who are desperate for answers. Concerns over the misinterpretation of opioid deaths are kryptonite to these impostors because it is one of the many malevolent angles whereby all of us were all played. Discernment is a gift, but humility a moral choice that facilitates discernment only in those of us who are humble enough to own their mistakes and use them as a learning opportunity.
*Hat tip: “Cement Angel” from the Gigaohm Biological discussion platform.
Acknowledgements: All of this research is based on information I gleaned from listening to the podcasts of Jonathan Couey of Gigaohm Biological and Mark Kulacz of Housatonic. I am forever in their debt for their dragging me (kicking and screaming) out of the cave.