Insurance Data Showing the U.S. Excess Death Crisis Slides Behind a $10,000 Paywall
An actuarial society's research depicted a huge surge in non-covid deaths in young insured workers. Is it pulling back on sharing its findings?
The Society of Actuaries has put up a five-figure paywall for access to new reports on covid mortality that in the past have revealed shocking rates of above-normal, or “excess,” deaths.
In a post on its website, the SOA—a national source of risk data for life insurers—said it will charge $10,000 for four updates of post-pandemic deaths through next February.
“This new series of group life mortality quarterly reports and data are only available for purchase,” SOA communications manager, Michael Nowak, confirmed in an email. Previous reports—which showed young workers dying at far higher excess rates than senior citizens—are still available on the SOA website, he said, and new, less-technical ones will be released to the public at an unspecified time.
Some industry watchers suggested the non-profit society, whose members pays dues, may be trying to develop a new business model. But it also may be attempting to extract itself from the contentious and politically charged issue of excess deaths and, moreover, what is causing them.
Nowak would not grant my request to interview an SOA official who recently told a trade publication that deaths in young insured adults in 2023 were still far above normal. “Very important information in our reports we’ve been studying,” the official told me before our communication was cut off.
Moreover, in an email, Nowak included an advisory, writing, “Please know that the SOA Research Institute data and reports on COVID-19 mortality does not validate any claims made to suggest a causal relationship between COVID-19 vaccines and mortality.”
I had not asked about such a relationship.
The society’s primary job is to help insurers set rates based on the likelihood of injury and death, an indisputably technical and costly task. But because it is considered an unbiased source of trend information, its reports have also helped define the pandemic toll on working-age, insured people. While SOA has the right to use its reports as it sees fit, their loss would be a blow to pandemic information.
In six articles published in mainstream venues, Dr. Pierre Kory, president emeritus of FLCCC Alliance, and I have used Society of Actuaries findings to call attention to the unheralded problem of excess deaths in America. In the first nine months of 2023, 158,000 more Americans died than normal, fifty times the toll in the World Trade Center attacks and more than in every U.S. military conflict since the Vietnam War.
Our opinion articles appeared in USA Today, Newsweek, The Hill, Trial Site News/Rescue Substack, the Washington Times and Real Clear Health. All of them called for a concerted, high-level investigation of the circumstances that have fueled young adult mortality. The last three questioned the potential involvement of covid vaccines.
In early 2023, a seminal SOA report revealed a wave of deaths in the third quarter of 2021 among insured people under 45 that was 80 percent above the pre-pandemic norm. At the same time, deaths among people 65 and older were 16 percent higher, defying common wisdom that older people were more vulnerable and younger people more robust.
In response to the large fee on upcoming reports, Dr. Kory said, “I can only interpret the SOA’s actions in a deeply cynical way. This is exactly what happens to data that is ‘inconvenient’ to the authorities who launched and oversaw this catastrophic gene therapy vaccine campaign.”
A toxic combination?
In perhaps its most stunning revelation, SOA research showed that the highest excess death rate of any age group in the prime pandemic years occurred in the third quarter of 2021 among insured workers aged 35 to 44. They died at 201 percent of normal, which is double the pre-pandemic norm. Strikingly, in referring to excess deaths generally, the report said, “COVID-19 claims do not fully explain the increase in incurred claim incidence.”
Clearly, something else was—and still is—killing young people.
In early September of 2021, 100 million American workers, including many insured by companies SOA serves, were mandated to take covid vaccines or face job termination. As documented by the society, deaths in young insured adults soared in late 2021; the increase occurred in tandem with coerced vaccination and the crest of the Delta covid wave.
As Dr. Kory and I reported in Trial Site News and Rescue in January, vaccinating in the throes of a disease outbreak can worsen severity and mortality in a phenomenon called vaccine-associated enhanced disease. We showed that a 40 percent surge in maternal deaths in 2021 was almost entirely due not to pregnancy complications but to covid, occurring as Delta raged and pregnant women, who were strongly urged to vaccinate, became or were already infected.
In the pandemic’s first horrific year, 2020, just 16 pregnant women died from covid; in 2021—when vaccines were supposed to protect these women—335 of them died, we reported. (When the CDC announced the 40 percent maternal death increase, it made no mention of covid.)
Indeed, injecting millions of people under fast-track emergency-use authorization and with a minimally tested technology was akin to a roll of the dice. The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System offers a poignant tally of people who lost that gamble, including 18,862 domestic deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries including heart attacks, myocarditis, miscarriages, permanent disability, and severe allergic reactions.
With one exception, the Society of Actuaries has avoided addressing the fraught issue of covid vaccines. In its 2023 report, it found a fleeting correlation between excess deaths and vaccine uptake in 2021. The report urged caution, saying SOA “will likely omit this subsection from future reports unless a statistically significant relationship reemerges.”
Still dying young
For insurers, covid continues to be both a human tragedy and a financial problem. In 2022, life insurance companies paid $100 billion in death benefits, topping the record-setting $90 billion paid in 2020.
That costly surge in claims happened in the heat of covid. But even in post-pandemic 2024, more young adults are dying than normal, according to insurance industry publications.
ThinkAdvisor reported “much higher” deaths in early 2024 than in the same period in 2019—an excess of 8.9 percent in the first quarter. The trade journal Life Annuity Specialist, similarly, published an article on April 8, 2024, with the headline: “Excess Mortality is ‘New Normal’ as covid Continues to Kill.”
Another article, also in Life Annuity Specialist on April 12, paraphrased an official of the Society of Actuaries, R. Dale Hall, as saying there was a “dramatic and disturbing divergence between the mortality for different age groups.” While deaths overall were down, those among people under 45 were 15 to 20 percent above normal in 2023, Hall said.
In denying my request to speak with Hall, Nowak wrote, “The SOA is not able to participate in this opinion article. . . . Also we cannot speak to the trends in the life insurance industry.”
Meanwhile, the first of the high-priced upcoming reports, drawn from SOA surveys of claims paid by seventeen major group life insurance companies, is to be released this month.
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How about a Give Send Go campaign to pay the $10,000 fee for the data?
I’ll happily contribute
I wonder who got to them and how much they were paid or threatened. Just askin'