You may be disappointed with all of the unrest and negative outcomes we’ve been seeing during the Biden administration thus far. Uncle Joe’s dismal approval ratings clearly suggest that many Americans feel that way. But there might be a bit of consolation for you in the latest report from the CDC. An increasing number of you might not live long enough to suffer through much more of it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have released the American life expectancy figures for 2021 and they have dropped yet again. And we’re not talking about a couple of tenths of a decimal point here. After falling by almost two years in 2020, American life expectancy fell by just shy of another full year to 76 years and one month in 2021. What are they blaming this on? COVID, of course, but a host of other factors are involved as well. (Associated Press)

U.S. life expectancy dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, falling by nearly a year from 2020, according to a government report being released Wednesday.

In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated American lifespan has shortened by nearly three years. The last comparable decrease happened in the early 1940s, during the height of World War II.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials blamed COVID-19 for about half the decline in 2021, a year when vaccinations became widely available but new coronavirus variants caused waves of hospitalizations and deaths. Other contributors to the decline are longstanding problems: drug overdoses, heart disease, suicide and chronic liver disease.

So this is the lowest life expectancy the United States has seen since 1996. If you managed to innoculate more than three-quarters of the country with your fancy new vaccines and our life expectancy still dropped even further because of the disease you were “preventing,” I’d have some questions. Just sayin‘…

I’m sure there are some nihilists out there who see a declining average life span as a positive thing, but this is still quite worrisome. When you combine a shorter average life span with our continually plummeting birth rate, you have a formula for a society that will not be able to sustain itself over the long run.

But how many of those deaths were actually attributable to COVID? Remember that we’re getting these figures from the CDC, so it’s always worth pausing and looking under the covers. Keep in mind the fact that for most of 2021, the government was counting every dead person who tested positive for the virus as a “COVID death” even if they’d been killed in a car crash. The pandemic certainly killed a lot of people, but we’ve had other issues feeding into these trends as well.

Deaths by suicide have continued to increase in most areas or, at best, remain stagnant. No doubt the depression that many people have experienced during the lockdowns and seemingly unending bad news cycles feed into that somewhat.

Those who didn’t take their own lives had a greater chance of having someone else do it for them. Crime rates have been steadily increasing, particularly in America’s larger cities, and that includes homicides. The number one cause of death for Black males under the age of 30 last year was murder. Homicide may not be the number one cause of death overall (thankfully), but it’s clearly feeding into these life expectancy numbers.

And let’s not forget drug overdoses. Those deaths have been going through the roof for the past couple of years. The trend has definitively been driven by the massive amounts of fentanyl coming out of China and being smuggled into the United States across the southern border. Drug overdoses were already tragically high before the current era, but once fentanyl arrived on the scene, all bets were off. A tiny amount mixed in with other drugs such as cocaine or methamphetamines can snuff out someone who had no intention of dying that day.

It’s hoped that our life expectancy rate will begin to stabilize again once the pandemic is fully behind us. Perhaps that’s the case. But if we don’t start dealing with all of the other issues discussed here, it’s not going to begin increasing very quickly either.