Tag: causes of death

Children in America 80 Percent More Likely to Die Than Children in Other Industrialized Countries

The United States is confronting a growing pediatric health crisis, with mounting evidence pointing to a decline in children’s overall health and wellbeing. A recent study revealed that children in the U.S. are dying at significantly higher rates than their peers in other high-income nations, underscoring the severity of the issue.1 2

The cross-sectional study was published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association and found that from 2007 to 2023, U.S. children were 80 percent more likely to die than their peers in other high-income countries. The sources covered at least a decade of data, and the researchers analyzed hundreds of millions of health records from five nationally representative surveys and electronic health records.

Co-author of the children health study Chris Forrest, MD, PhD said that what is particularly frustrating is that the majority of the health problems and deaths occurring among children living in the U.S. are avoidable. Dr. Forrest also said the results were applicable to the total pediatric population and were not dependent upon socioeconomic status.1 3

For infants, the study cites premature birth, sudden infant death syndrome, and congenital anomalies as drivers of mortality. For children ages one to 19, causes of death were largely due to firearms, vehicle accidents, substance abuse, and homicide.3

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“Not As Safe As We Think”: Lidocaine Deaths Nearly Triple Over Past Decade

Poisonings and deaths linked to the common local anesthetic lidocaine have nearly tripled in the United States over the past decade, with fatal overdoses increasingly occurring outside hospitals, where untrained staff administer the supposedly “safe” anesthetic, a new analysis shows.

Over-the-counter topical lidocaine products, which typically contain up to 4 percent to 5 percent lidocaine, are primarily used for temporary relief of pain, itching, and burning sensations. The pain reliever is available in various forms, including creams, ointments, gels, sprays, patches, and foaming soaps. However, in medical settings, it can pose risks that many people may not be aware of.

“Lidocaine is not as safe as we think,” Dr. Michael Fettiplace, study author and assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine, told The Epoch Times.

Increase Seen from 2011 to 2022

A recent study, published in Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine, reveals a trend hidden within America’s medical system. While overall poisonings from local anesthetics dropped 23 percent after 2010—when medical organizations issued new safety guidelines—lidocaine cases bucked the trend.

Among the risks associated with the drug, lidocaine can cause systemic toxicity when introduced into the bloodstream at high levels. This condition, known as local anesthetic systemic toxicity, primarily affects the central nervous system and cardiovascular system, potentially leading to seizures, arrhythmias, and even cardiac arrest.

Fettiplace’s team had documented increasing toxicity cases in medical literature, but underestimated how often those cases proved fatal. “We identified a rise in mortality events associated with lidocaine, which was unexpected,” he said. “In retrospect, it is not surprising.”

The study analyzed more than 200,000 poisoning cases reported to U.S. poison control centers between 1983 and 2022, including 74 deaths from local anesthetics.

While deaths from other anesthetics declined, the proportion of fatalities linked to lidocaine rose from 67 percent in 2010 to 82 percent in recent years. Overall, 0.1 percent of lidocaine poisoning cases resulted in death, compared with 0.01 percent for other local anesthetics.

In absolute numbers, reports of lidocaine poisoning jumped more than 50 percent, from 1,600 cases in 2016 to 2,500 in 2021.

Many of the deaths occurred after the patient overdosed on lidocaine themselves or received an overdose in outpatient settings.

One case described a 70-year-old man going into cardiac arrest and dying after being administered a 2 percent lidocaine solution. He had undergone an outpatient cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and instead of having the MRI dye flushed with normal saline, he was given lidocaine instead.

While poisonings occurred across all age and gender demographics, cases occurred most frequently at home, Fettiplace noted.

The study described one case in which a man inhaled imported lidocaine powder from China to treat his gastroesophageal reflux disease and became unconscious.

“Undoubtedly, there is underreporting,” Fettiplace said. “I cannot predict an upper limit of the increase.”

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Hospitals Turned Into Killing Centers During Pandemic — Will We Learn From the Mistakes?

When historians one day sift through the wreckage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central question won’t be how many lives the virus claimed. It will be: how many were lost to a system that collapsed into fear, censorship and fatal conformity?

At TrialSite News, we chronicled the crisis as it unfolded. We reported — early, relentlessly, and despite immense pushback — that the majority of COVID-19 infections were mild to moderate.

Peer-reviewed research later affirmed what we knew by spring 2020: roughly 90–95% of infections did not require hospitalization, and those at real risk were predominantly the elderly or chronically ill.

Even Bill Gates eventually admitted the fatality rate was relatively low and the disease pattern was akin to the flu. Just think of the implications.

But public health leaders didn’t follow the data — they followed panic and centralized narrative control promulgated by a confluence of government, industry and academia. And the price was paid in hospital wards across America.

A misdiagnosed disease met with misguided protocols

Ventilators became the instrument of tragedy. Early guidance — mirroring protocols from China — promoted rapid intubation. In New York’s spring 2020 surge, nearly nine out of 10 intubated patients died.

Though that number softened as more data emerged, the damage was done. Hospitals, misreading COVID pneumonia as typical ARDS, deployed invasive mechanical ventilation far too aggressively.

Patients with “silent hypoxia” — low oxygen but no distress — were sedated and intubated when non-invasive oxygen support might have sufficed.

What followed was a cascade of preventable deaths: ventilator-associated pneumonia, sedation complications, ICU delirium and multi-organ failure. We heard the stories. We saw the data. Too many walked in with breathlessness and left in body bags. It was a tragic disaster.

This wasn’t just clinical failure; it was bureaucratic blindness and potential criminality. Across hospital systems, the practice of “homogenized care” erased the art of medicine in favor of algorithmic treatment pathways.

Individual patient context vanished. And families — banned from the bedside — couldn’t intervene.

The forgotten treatments — cheap, effective, ignored

As thousands perished under sedation, treatments that could have helped were either dismissed or demonized. The RECOVERY trial in June 2020 showed that dexamethasone — a low-cost steroid — cut deaths by one-third in ventilated patients.

But months had already passed. Why didn’t we try anti-inflammatory therapies sooner?

Remember the ICAM protocol TrialSite reported on? Early on in the pandemic, a pharmacist for a southern health system was saving lives with a combination of steroids, blood thinners and the like. Yet this was shut down, we were told to due to a Pfizer contract with the health system.

Meanwhile, the government rushed emergency use approval for remdesivir, a drug that shortened hospital stays but did not reduce mortality — and carried notable toxicity risks. The opportunity cost was tragic. Time and attention were stolen from better solutions.

Frontline doctors proposing repurposed drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, in carefully designed early protocols, were silenced or sanctioned.

TrialSite News, remember, scooped ivermectin itself, then gave these doctors a platform — from Peter McCullough to Pierre Kory-publishing observational data, real-world insights and field-tested regimens.

But the Dr. Anthony Fauci-led National Institutes of Health dismissed outpatient care entirely. Americans were told to stay home, take nothing and seek help only once they couldn’t breathe. For many, that was too late.

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Into the Abyss: How Bad Can the Covid Vaccine Story Get?

All Brownstone readers know that the Covid vaccines should never have been mandatory and should never have been prescribed to children or pregnant women, groups for which they were not tested. All of us have been alarmed to see stories of surprisingly many sudden heart failures, turbo cancers, and failed pregnancies in the days and months following the rollout of these shots.

How bad can it be? What is the worst estimate of the impact of the Covid vaccines on the count of living humans for which there is both some degree of empirical evidence and biological plausibility? Let us look into the heart of darkness and consider the worst.

Domain 1: Worldwide Excess Deaths

The principal source for global mortality data is the United Nations World Population Prospects, which at the time of writing had not been updated with a definitive number for 2024. We therefore only use data through 2023. Below we plot the total number of deaths in the world since 1950, and add to that a projection of the 10-year trend before 2020 through to 2023 (shown in the graph below as a red line). The numbers reveal that yearly death counts change fairly smoothly over time, except when humans do something stupid like the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962, which corresponds to the previous big spike in world deaths evident on the graph and which has been estimated to have cost the lives of around 45 million people.

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Air Force command pauses M18 pistol use after airman’s death at Wyoming base

The U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command has paused the use of a handgun following the death of a Security Forces airman at a base in Wyoming.

The use of the M18 pistol, a variant of another gun that has been the target of lawsuits over unintentional discharge allegations, was paused Monday “until further notice” following the “tragic incident” Sunday at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, the command said in a statement. Security Forces airmen at all command bases “will conduct 100% inspections of the M18 handguns to identify any immediate safety concerns,” it said.

The airman killed was Brayden Lovan, 21, of the 90th Security Forces Squadron, 90th Missile Wing at the base, where he began his first active-duty assignment in November 2023, base officials said Thursday.

Details of what happened are not being released pending an investigation, said Lt. Raegan Lockhart, public affairs officer for the 90th Missile Wing. How long the investigation might take isn’t known, Lockhart added.

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HORROR: 3-Year-Old Boy Dies in Hot Car While with Child Services — Government Took Him From Father, Then Left Him to Die

A horrifying failure of state “oversight” led to the death of a 3-year-old boy after he was abandoned for five hours inside a sweltering vehicle by a child welfare contractor hired by the Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR).

Ke’Torrius “KJ” Starks Jr. was taken from his family and placed into the care of a foster system that was supposed to protect him.

He was picked up from daycare at 9:00 a.m. for a court-ordered supervised visit with his biological father, which ended at 11:30 a.m., according to People.

Instead of returning him to daycare, he was allegedly abandoned in a hot car for five hours while a DHR contract worker ran errands for herself—including picking up food for her family and shopping at a tobacco store, according to the family’s attorney.

The incident took place Tuesday in Birmingham as temperatures soared above 100 degrees.

The heat index reached 108°F, meaning the temperature inside the vehicle likely exceeded a deadly 150°F, according to attorney Courtney French.

More from People:

French says that the worker, who was employed to do transport through Covenant Services Inc., went Tuesday morning to pick KJ up from a child care center to bring him for a supervised visit with his dad.

Afterward, however, the worker did not bring the boy back to his center and instead decided “to run numerous personal errands with KJ still in a car seat in the back,” French claims. The stops including getting food and going to a tobacco shop.

The employee then went home but KJ was left in the car, according to French.

“The safety net that should have been in place to protect KJ and others like him is what caused his death,” French says. “So the very system that is in place for his protection was the system that led to his death — and that’s what’s so tragic about this.”

DHR says, “A child in DHR custody was being transported by a contract provider,” and confirmed the provider has fired the employee—yet refuses to disclose identity, safety protocols, or any meaningful accountability, citing confidentiality laws.

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Midazolam murder: “If you want to kill somebody, get a doctor or a nurse to do it”

Derek Dimmock, an 86-year-old man from Putney, UK, was admitted to the Royal Trinity Hospice in June 2020 with gout and later died under controversial circumstances.  His family is alleging he was involuntarily euthanised using midazolam, a sedative often used in end-of-life care.

His family claims he was given a cocktail of end-of-life drugs, including midazolam, which they argue was inappropriate and hastened his death.  Derek was given enough midazolam to “kill an elephant,” a source close to the family said.

The case is currently under investigation, with an inquest examining whether his death was a natural occurrence or an unlawful killing.  The case was heard by a Senior Coroner in March; the inquest resumes in August 2025.

During an interview, the barrister for the Dimmock family explained how midazolam is used by the NHS to end someone’s life and said, “If you want to kill somebody, get a doctor or a nurse to do it, because it’s very, very difficult to pin the blame on them.”

Barrister James Bogle, who specialises in clinical negligence, is representing the Dimmock family in a legal capacity.  Bogle is familiar with the state’s abuse and misuse of drugs to end people’s lives.  In 2023 he provided the legal analysis for the report titled ‘When end of life care goes wrong’, which examined the excessive and inappropriate use of midazolam and morphine in the UK.  The report is available from Voice for Justice UK, see HERE.

At the end of June, Bogle joined Peter McCormack’s podcast, during which he said “the favoured way of shortening a life” is the use of a combination of midazolam and morphine.  In the following, Maajid Nawaz explains more.

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Environmental Regulations Are Literally Baking Europeans to Death

Much of the U.S. has been suffering a sweltering heat wave for the past two weeks. Though uncomfortable, particularly in areas with nearly 100 percent humidity like Washington, D.C., most Americans experience heat waves as a sweaty annoyance. Our European counterparts are not so fortunate, thanks to excessive regulations driving up the price of energy and outright banning certain air conditioning units.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put 130 million Americans “under extreme heat warnings or heat advisories [last] Thursday…with 282 locations breaking daily heat records,” according to The Guardian. CNN reported that at least one death in the St. Louis area was ascribed to the heat wave, but mass casualties have not been suffered stateside. Meanwhile, in Europe, eight people have died across the continent as of Wednesday: four in Spain (two were killed in a wildfire that is believed to be driven by hot, dry conditions), two in France, and two more in Italy, per Al Jazeera. 

The situation was even worse during the summer of 2023. The U.K. Health Security Agency estimated that 2,295 deaths were associated with excessive heat. The U.S., meanwhile, recorded nearly the same number of heat-related deaths (2,325), despite having a population (335 million) nearly five times greater than the U.K. population (​​68 million) at the time.

The United Nations estimates that the European continent accounted for approximately 175,000 heat-related deaths annually between 2000 and 2019. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, calculates that about 1,300 deaths per year in the U.S. are due to extreme heat. (This translates to four heat-related deaths per million annually in the U.S. and 235 heat-related deaths per million annually across Europe.)

There are myriad reasons why there are so many more heat-related deaths in Europe than there are in the United States. But the most significant explanation might just be the simplest: air conditioning.

David S. Jones, a physician and historian at Harvard University, told CNN in 2023 that the disparity is explained by some combination of the U.S. underreporting its numbers and heat being more lethal in Europe due to the lack of air conditioning. The American-European disparity along this latter dimension could hardly be greater: nearly 90 percent of U.S. households have air conditioning, whereas less than 10 percent of European homes do. The productivity gap between the U.S. and Europe helps explain this disparity.

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Media’s perverse focus on heat deaths is leading to wrongheaded climate policies

Across the United States and Europe, the media are warning of dangerously high temperatures.

“Extreme Heat Is Breaking America,” warns the New York Times. “Lethal heat is Europe’s new climate reality,” adds Politico.

It’s an annual routine: Expect to be inundated with alarming stories about heat domes, heat deaths and heat waves, pointing to the urgency of climate action.

But this narrative will tell you only a misleading fraction of the story.

The impacts of heat waves are stark and immediately visible, meaning they are photogenic and coverage is click-worthy.

Heat kills within just a few days of temperatures going up, because it swiftly alters the electrolytic balance in weaker, often older people.

These deaths are tragic and often preventable, and we hear about them every summer.

But the media seldom report on deaths from cold.

Cold kills slowly — often over months. In low temperatures, the body constricts peripheral blood vessels to conserve heat, raising blood pressure.

But deaths from cold far outnumber those from heat. The most comprehensive Lancet study shows that while heat kills nearly half a million people globally each year, cold kills more than 4.5 million — i.e., nine times more.

Yet, perversely, global media instead write nine times more stories about heat waves than cold waves.

We deserve to know which is the bigger threat.

We should know, for example, that the United States sees more than 80,000 deaths from cold each year, vastly outweighing its 8,000 heat deaths.

In Latin America and Europe, cold deaths outweigh heat deaths 4 to 1. In Africa, astonishingly, it’s 46 to 1.

Even in India — where the Western media have fixated on extreme heat this year — cold deaths outnumber those from heat 7 to 1.

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FDA, CDC advisers say lost pregnancies higher than expected following early mRNA vaccination

President Trump’s second-term agenda has been careful not to cast doubt on his signature first-term achievement, the development of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, which congressional Republicans continue to laud and even claim was sabotaged by Pfizer to deny Trump a consecutive term despite his base souring on the therapeutics.

A new preprint study on mRNA COVID vaccines in early pregnancy, coauthored by top advisers to Trump’s Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may fuel the splintering of the Make America Healthy Again movement as the jabs’ opponents ramp up pressure on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ban them.

Not yet peer-reviewed, the study analyzed hundreds of thousands of Israeli medical records on pregnant women in the three years before and after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China, finding 43% more “observed-to-expected” fetal losses per 100 pregnancies — 13 instead of nine — when the first mRNA dose is taken between 8-13 weeks’ pregnancy.

Pregnant women who took a booster between 8-13 weeks lost an additional two pregnancies per 100, a “potential dose-response relationship,” the study said.

By using pregnant women who got flu vaccines between 8-27 weeks and women who received either vaccine before their pregnancy as “comparative controls,” the authors said they were able to show the association is unique to COVID vaccines. 

The former had a “consistently lower-than-expected observed number of fetal losses, likely the result of healthy vaccinee bias” – in which people with overall better health tend to have higher vaccination rates – while the latter had “according-to-expected or lower-than-expected numbers of fetal losses,” the study found.

It said “almost all” mRNA doses were made by Pfizer, whose own 2021 report to the FDA – which the agency hid for 16 months until a court made it public – shows 44% of women in Pfizer’s clinical trial lost their pregnancies.

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