Declining infant/childhood mortality. A lot of people who used to die "merely" through disease and accidents are living just long enough to get cancer.
There is variability between years. Common cold rates and deaths from pneumonia change from year to year. Who knows, maybe some of the viruses have a carcenogenic potential? After all, other viruses, like herpesviruses do have a strong carcenogenic potential.
Besides the graph on the total cancer mortality could suggest that most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked...
This was the been known since the health worker effect was determined when studying atomic veterans in the 1980's. Being healthy enough to join the military is enough to increase one's risk of dying from cancer. Another joke is that the best way to lower one's risk of dying from cancer is driving one's motorcycle in the rain without a helmet.
If one is not being just snarky, atomic veterans are service members who participated in atmospheric nuclear tests from 1945 to 1961. When those who were exposed at Bikini Atoll in 1946 started to age into cancer in the 1980's, a large series of epidemiological studies were done on the veterans.
And for the military over all, being in the military increases the chance of dying in a traffic accident.
My late step-monster claimed her USAF weatherman father was at a Bikini test and had to have repeated surgeries in the 90s, removing skin off his head for melanoma because of it. Yet she knew I'd had a melanoma in '91, and that's not the way that cancer works. My sister later found out it was just (the heartbreak of) psoriasis. Woman couldn't stop lying, but he might have been there. A friend's USN dad arranged shore entertainment for a '58 test. He's in his late 80s.
Marine Steve McQueen served on ships filled with asbestos and died of cancer at a fairly early age. Military types tend to be indifferent to human suffering when it comes to the military code.
A better way to think of it is that the DoD does not pursue nor implement every OSHA regulation in a wartime situation. However, veterans die at a higher rate from all cancers compared to the general population because no one who served in the military died of a childhood disease, a congenital defect, or a childhood accident.
This isn't necessarily it, but it is a great example of why this whole question is jumping the gun. I am extremely skeptical that Steve's uptick anything other than random variation.
The very different statement that the NYTimes opinion piece mentions (increasing cases of cancer in youngish people) is very likely to be a math trick such as the example you give. The author jumping straight to environmental causes just shows his instincts for probability and statistics is as poor as the rest of us.
I wonder if we will ever get the stats that would truly be eye opening. I will admit to being a Covid vax skeptic right up front. That said... I can't help but notice that for the first time in our extended family, a young child of 13 was diagnosed with leukemia a year and a half ago. Just this week, a neighbor's 14 year old daughter was diagnosed with bone cancer. The link? Democrat parents that went fully head on into having those kids Covid vaccinated. Will the stat showing cancer rates among the Covid children vaxxed/unvaxxed ever be shown? I'm not counting on it.
What are the most pro-vax and anti-vax states? You tell me and I'll look up their death rates in 2019 and 2024. I haven't done this already so I look forward to finding out.
My cancer examples are Maryland and Nevada, but I don't know if that's relevant. Wouldn't the most pro-vax be regions like New England? They were double masking before double masking became a thing. Husband's college friend lives in Connecticut and I can verify they were over the top insane up there. Give Connecticut a try?
Speaking of New England... many years ago, my family lived in the Boston suburbs for a couple of years while my wife worked at MIT. We moved back to Texas but I never canceled my subscription to the neighborhood mailing list, so I saw all of the crazy Covid chatter that was going back and forth.
The best one was a lady who asked that people not jog or bike in the street past her house, because people exercising breathe more heavily and therefore someone infected would be putting the rest of the neighborhood at higher risk.
This devolved into a full-on argument between people who said she was crazy and others(!) who said she had a point, so why not be careful?
I saved that email chain because it was pretty much perfect.
Okay, Maryland's "malignant neoplasm" (i.e., cancer) death rate for age 0 to 49 declined from 13.5 in 2019 to 13.3 in 2024, while its cancer death rate in Nevada went from 14.4 to 16.0.
Here is a great example of the relatively small absolute numbers we are talking about. Are you sure a change of a few deaths per 100,000 in such a small cohort is actually reflective of a change in the underlying reality? Almost definitely not.
Wait... what about stats that show cancer incidences/reportings rather than deaths? I think that is the number that might be surprising. The two personal examples I cited aren't dead - yet.
It the 2nd quarter of 2025. The covid vax was introduced at the very end of the 4th quarter of 2020. If it's really killing people en masse, you ought to have some evidence for that by now.
WTF are you talking about, Steve? The mortality rate has been running 5-10% above the baseline ever since the end of 2022. And this is with COVID clearing out the most frail elderly all by itself.
I'm with you WRT it causing the (probably imaginary) increase in cancer deaths. The only evidence that might point to a problem with the vaccine (might, MIGHT!) is the mysterious and yet unexplained excess mortality that continued to show in stats long after the pandemic ended. I would have expected negative excess deaths after two years of excess deaths...but that didn't happen. Quite the opposite. why? I don't know if anyone is even looking into it.
Yes, covid vaccine has been introduced around year end 2020/2021. However, it took about half a year ? before youngish white people became vaccinated. Also studies from Chernobyl with exposure to radioactive iodine suggest that there is like a 6-8 year lead between exposure and peak cancer.
Steve's analysis is about deaths. The article he cited was talking about increased case rates over the decades. As Steve pointed out, treatment get slightly better over time and it looks like in that age group those advances overcame the increases in case numbers. Then that progress slowed down in recent years. Is that because the number of cases suddenly went up more than it had on average? We cannot tell from the numbers presented.
My uneducated guess would be that it might mirror the Dem/Rep divide amongst the white population. So may be WV and Wyoming anti-vax, Minnesota pro-vax? But am just guessing.
ehhhhh- maybe except the thing about humans is that we are great at noticing patterns. We're so good at it in fact, that we notice patterns that aren't real. This is why medical researchers have developed standards for looking into questions like these. Almost inevitably it turns out to be just random distributions. Those tend to clump more than people think.
Looks like the timing of the rise matches pretty closely with the Covid “vaccines.” Maybe that would be a good place to look? 🤷🏼
Kinda seems like whether one is willing to look at this as a strong possibility (along with other factors, so I’m not discounting other things in the modern environment) depends pretty often on age and whether one has had the vax or not.
I say age due to older generations having far more trust in our American institutions, especially medical. And, of course, those who didn’t get the covid jab were already more skeptical.
But doesn’t the fact that research into the MRNA shots and their long term effects gets suppressed as if it is in the same category as group differences in intelligence when it comes to peer-reviewed studies a clue about something?
What are the most pro-vax counties (Santa Clara, CA?) and the most anti-vax counties (McDowell, WV?)? You show me which one you want think would be most affected and I'll look up their total death rates in 2019 vs. 2024 for you.
I hear you, but given the percentages that were covid vaxed are so high throughout the US and most of the rest of the world, combined with the fact that cancer rates (especially only among and age cohort) are so small, comparing rates between the lowest vaxed nation with the highest vaxed nation would produce far more accurate results.
Plus, just off the top of my head, I’d assume the CA county you named had much better health than what is likely some rural WV county, so that wouldn’t necessarily be an apples to apples comparison. The same would apply if we compared national rates between the US versus Afghanistan.
It looks like based on your graph, the aggregate in the US of before covid vaxed versus after covid vaxed at minimum warrants further research. Plus, this was a new technology that technically isn’t even a vax that was rushed through. It seems like due diligence requires looking into the long term effects. Maybe the white fibrous clots, the “died suddenly” phenomenon, turbo cancers, and more could be linked. I’m not saying it is definite. It’s a question that warrants an empirical answer given it affects a huge portion of the world’s population.
Give me some examples of places that in 2024 paid the cost for vax enthusiasm and some places that were wisely skeptical of the vax and I'll look up any sets of cause-of-death rate you want.
I'm not going to propose places myself because I've done that before and people got mad at me for supposedly rigging the analysis.
So you tell me, and then I'll look it up.
But not until after you commit yourself to a theory I can test.
Ok. I’m just going off the top of my head here. I’d say Australia would be a good candidate for a vaxed to the max nation, and preferring a comparable population, I’m not sure which would be the least vaxed. Therefore, I’ll go with the US, and perhaps we could add another data point by throwing in Sweden.
This may show nothing, or it may show something. Regardless, it is not unlikely all show an uptick or at least slowing down of lowering rates given the widespread vaxing. Of course, that won’t prove either perspective the correct one.
Again, while it is not good policy to have a “shoot first ask questions later” policy for a drug using not thoroughly tested technology that is shot into a huge portion of the world’s population, it is definitely worthwhile to get the data on long term effects of the jab.
And I say it’s not unlikely all will show an increase given they all have huge proportions of their populations covid vaxed.
A skeptic could interpret that as “its other environmental factors because this one was vaxed 90% and this one was only 70%, yet they all show similar increases,” while the vax blamer would say “it’s the vax! See they all had increases around the same time.”
Hence the need for top notch research, which I think is a reasonable position.
Either way, the rise in cancer rates is higher in vulnerable populations due to systemic white racism. Don’t bother checking that one. Alternative explanations have been thoroughly debunked. Lol
Sunflower County, MS, Greene County AL, McDowell County WV, Warren County, PA, Medina County, OH, Starr County TX, San Miguel County NM, Oglala Lakota County SD and Baltimore City MD.
Oh. I’m sorry. I misunderstood. When you said places, you meant in the USA. That makes sense given the access to data. Plus, if I recall correctly, Australia hoards its data jealously. Lol
Honestly, I certainly don’t know Covid vax rates by county (and state versus state would be better), so any guess would be based on politics of the state. Lefties were more likely to take the vax, so if I must choose, I’d say Vermont for high uptake and Wyoming for lower (though probably still high).
Nonetheless, I don’t think perspectives can be changed based on what mostly amounts to anecdotal evidence, but I’d be interested in what the data points are. Thank you, Mr. Sailor.
One of West Virginia's little acknowledged problems is obesity. Obesity tends to bring on more heart ailments and cancer. Two West Virginia anecdotes. I bought two lambs from a farmer three years ago. He was 63, way overweight and almost bragged that he had had three heart attacks. His wife and daughter were fatter than he was. And one of the first West Virginians to die of Covid was 24. He weighed over 400 pounds.
The COVID vax started five years ago. I'm no expert (psych! yes I am) but no way is that enough time or exposure to cause a noticeable uptick in cancer deaths. If this turns out to be the answer, I'll eat my hat.
you'd think but then there could be other factors...all these are very difficult to disambiguate which is why, even if it turns out death rates are rising for real, one should be skeptical assigning blame to his own hobbyhorse (I'm looking at you RFK jr)
Normally I would agree with you, but the new phenomenon physicians seem to have colloquially named “turbo cancers” that are popping up quickly in all ages makes me think it much more possible now.
Yes, some amount of time will still be needed to result in actual deaths, but there are differences apart from the rate of spread. The mRNA jabs cause our cells to produce a protein foreign to our bodies (the spike protein we’ve all heard of). Messing with programming our DNA to produce these spike proteins may have many consequences of which we are unaware. We cannot be certain.
What we really need is all the data on rates before and after the intro of the vax AND the ability to separate the data between those who received it versus those who didn’t, but for some reason they don’t want to collect this data, or they at least won’t acknowledge it and allow the public to access it.
Regardless of what turns up, these issues, not just cancers, should be investigated and the results shared in a manner accessible to the public. That seems the very least they could do given they injected the vast majority of people with a barely tested drug, and governments gave them immunity from any liability for negative consequences.
I had never heard of turbo cancers and looked it up. It traces to one doc claiming cancers are popping up quickly and spreading fast. I can't find any papers documenting either phenomenon and it doesn't make sense anyway. What does it mean for a cancer to pop up fast? People have always been diagnosed with cancers before they had symptoms. Isn't that the only thing popping up fast could mean? There have always been fast spreading (after Dx) cancers. Not only does it not sound new (aside from the cute name) I don't see how we could possibly know if something like that were new. It's bunk unless you can show me something I haven't thought of.
The mRNA jabs cause our cells to produce a protein foreign to our bodies (the spike protein we’ve all heard of)--also not new. This is what every virus ever does. That's pretty much the characteristic of viridae- they hijack your DNA transcription/translation machinery to make their own proteins.
And a lot of them stick around and even integrate into your genome and continue to force you to make their proteins forever. I'm pretty sure some can even be passed on to to the next generation. I think we have ancient viruses sticking around.
I'm also nearly certain the mRNA vaccine cannot do that. it doesn't have a reverse transcriptase so it would need something already in your body to manage it. Complex systems and all so I wouldn't say definitely not but if it happens we should be able to find it with current technology--where are the papers?
Your body is a lot more resilient to these tiny insults than you think. You are only focusing on this one because it was in the news in your face and political.
It is interesting that higher height is associated with higher cancer risk.
My (layman) theory is that height is caused by more growth hormone, which is a stress hormone, which leads to skeletal growth but also undifferentiated growth of all cells.
Cancer is caused by stress on the cell, which then begins to grow.
(Stress in the widest sense of Selye: “The nonspecific response of the body to any demand for change.”)
In general, I would say: an increase in cancer in society signifies an increase of stress in society.
That would be an argument only if cancer is random without influence by the environment, like a random mutagenesis.
This was once the hypothesis, but mostly founded in ideology or the acknowledgement of our ignorance.
There are not many indications that this is a good hypothesis. E.g. elephants ave not more cancer than mice; some cells are much more prone to become cancerous.
There are other theories of cancer, e.g. cancer as a metabolic disease, where the number if cells have no influence. E.g. Warburg.
Everyone needs to remember that five years is not long enough for any substance in the environment to be an initiator of cancer and for the cancer to be diagnosed. It used to be that 10 years as a minimum.
We will never know. Why? 1) Too many factors. 2) Corrupt and rigid systems. 3) Limits to statistical analysis and inference. 4) Limits on data (See point 2)
And not to be mean, but everyone’s pet theories are getting to be tiresome.
I don’t have a theory. On one side of my family/friend groups I have militant anti-vaxers telling me one thing, while another group who believe everything the government tells them (proud adherents of The Science) telling me something else. One’s head begins to spin.
My first assumption would be the data is showing a random walk. If that turns out not to be true and Im asked to add my own pet theory into the melting pot I would surmise it has something to do with lifestyles/changes in consumption that our bodies can’t handle from an evolutionary perspective. (Yes I listen to the Weinsteins)
Of course the Covid MRNA Vax, the Age of Netflix, factory farming, increased number of hours flying at 35,000 feet, sanitized environments, exposure to trace chemicals that didn’t exist 100 years ago and adding High Fructose Corn Syrup to the top of the food chain would all qualify. If I had to choose based on a common theme of inflammation I would go with obesity and our sedentary lifestyles.
I mean, I realize it's just the internet and we're all just speculating on a hypotenuse here but it honestly sounds like your mind is made up: it wasn't the jab no how, no way.
Probably it's a confluence of factors, maybe including the fact that we told everyone not to go to the doctor for two years unless they had symptoms of a respiratory virus.
Similar to BrettBaker I’m guessing it has to something to do with more biodiversity of the 45 to 49 age cohort (for various reasons). We are just producing more Lemons. The recent death of Val Kilmer reminds you how cancer can strike anyone and it just seems so random. Of course he was an Hollywood A-Lister, so maybe lifestyle had an effect.
Since this seems to be the crowd to hear this: My son goes to Hopkins. They were one of the most stringent/bullying universities about mandating the Covid vaccine (one of the last to abandon it, too). I wrote an air tight religious exemption, since medical exemptions were being denied left and right. I held my breath when my son submitted it. They approved it in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! Makes you wonder if they even took the virus seriously.
I wonder how many college students everywhere could have been spared, had they not been scared and threatened into not making an attempt.
It has been pretty clear for a while that there is a relationship between the immune system and cancer. It has also been pretty clear - although not very well publicized - that the mechanism of the mRNA vaccines basically spoils the immune system from the inside out from overuse because the pathogen never goes away. Whereas a normal infection enters the body once and eventually gets killed off, the mRNA - contrary to what was expected - is constantly making spike proteins and "infecting" the body. Basically, the covid spike protein becomes an "allergy" that the body gets used to. But, instead of something relatively benign like pollen or latex, it's an allergy to a very nasty pathogen that wreaks great damage on the body.
It doesn't take an immunology degree to see that if the immune system is degraded and begins to lose its effectiveness, cancer cells that would have usually been immediately ushered away instead are allowed to grow into tumors and the host develops full-on cancer.
First it was acute injuries like blood clots and aneurisms, now it's long term damage like cancer. The covid vaccine and the rush to inject a large portion of the population with it multiple times with very little to no long term safety data - we are living through the "long term" right now - is going to be the biggest scandal in the history of mankind.
Me personally, I resisted the pressure and never got the shot, despite being hospitalized for a week and almost dying. I knew it was a mania and I could tell there was no long-term data for either that "vaccine" specifically or mRNA technology generally, and I knew it was risky so I declined to get the shot. And now, I have no worries whatsoever about having a "time bomb" in my body. It's one of my proudest moments in life.
You want to talk about stress? Being someone who rushed out to get the shot multiple times and now knowing that the likelihood of all of these nasty side effects that could pop up someday... THAT would be stressful.
Vaccine adoption for senior citizens was pretty uniformly high across the country IIRC. But for younger cohorts there was much more variation. If the Covic vaccines are to blame it might be worth investigating whether cancer rates are uniform between blue and red zip codes.
If it is Covid vaccine or something about Covid itself, wouldn’t there be an increase in older populations too? I doubt this theory. Plus see my other comment. The WSJ has stats showing the increase predates Covid.
Isn’t it possible that variations in rates of detected cancers would be caused primarily by variations in cancer detection efforts?
I didn’t know I had stage 4 lung cancer until I walked (very slowly) into an emergency room with a collapsed lung. Who knows how long I have had it, and I’m an oldster who gets annual checkups. I assume younger adults would be even more likely to walk around with cancers undetected.
Did covid cause many more young adults to visit a clinic where detection might occur?
The question you should ask is not whether more cancers were detected among the living, but whether for any reason more deaths were coded as cancer deaths among the dead.
Steve Sailer has said he only has 100% (or near-100%) trust in police data when it comes to homicides, because realistically there is not much way to explain away a corpse or have murder-victims slip through the data-cracks.
I think COVID itself or the vaccine seem the most likely given the timing though of course it could be a coincidence. If you’re looking for candidates, I nominate Utah and New England. Both fairly wealthy and healthy populations. Here in Utah, vaccine uptake among children seemed pretty low (no mandates, many children infected naturally since schools remained open).
Cellphones could be another, either directly through something woo-adjacent like “radiation”, or through isolation/sedentary behavioral impacts.
If it’s truly a multigenerational build up though it’s gotta be the food/additives/pesticides/ etc. are the increases global or specific to the USA? That could help isolate whether it’s something like e.g. glyphosate amounts in food supply.
We wouldn't expect a large jump in per-capita rates, then. Changes of tenth-of-a-point here, a tenth there, would be possible if a large tranche of missing data with much-higher or much-lower death-rates get dumped into the pile. Not likely enough to change Steve's graph in a meaningful way at all.
The first plot seems to show a flattening decline over this 25-year period. Why does 2024 stand out to you? Is it because this is the first point at which the year-to-year change is positive? That could be within the noise (have you computed statistical significance of this change?).
Well, it doesn't look like something dramatic happened in 2024, just a continuation of the current trend--which looks go back at least to 2017, if not much earlier. Hard to make inferences from that....
I searched the CDC Wonder database for 2019 and 2024 under these parameters:
.
Ages 45-49
White non-Hispanic only
"Neoplasms" deaths per 100,000:
.
____________
2019 final, Whites:
- Northeast: 60.4
- Midwest: 65.9
- South: 71.0
- West: 58.7
____________
.
.
____________
2024 provisional, Whites (+/- change since 2019):
- Northeast: 54.1 (-6.3)
- Midwest: 64.8 (-1.1)
- South: 68.3 (-2.7)
- West: 52.6 (-6.1)
____________
.
White cancer-death rates in the Northeast and West regions declined at about the expected rate (i.e., something near the late-1990s-to-late-2010s trajectory-line). The Midwest and South are the anomaly,. They declined much less. (The South declined slightly more, but from a higher 2019-rate.) Explanations for the rise in cancer-deaths in the 2020s have to fit this fact.
To most people, the changes might be unimpressive. Especially against the alarmist claims of huge increases in cancer deaths being imminent by the mid-2020s. The higher 2024 rate is "only" a return to the ca.2016 rate. And in 2016, few were heard expressing much concern about a cancer crisis. Not in absolute terms. The problem, naturally, is whether the 2024 rates augur ever-higher rates to come.
The changes do, anyway, amount to HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of extra cancer deaths, when extrapolated out to other age groups, across the 2020s. (And for every death, there are even more with life-disrupting cancer battles that they survived with varying levels of life-disruption and long-term effects.)
The Median Man of the 2020s exists on a slightly lower-notch on Life's Lottery than he should. This is a breach of the Grand Bargain of our capitalist-liberal-multiracial-democracy system.
.
__________
.
.
Above I gave only the White rates by region. For comparison with the All-Race rates:
.
_______________
Ages 45-49
ALL RACES
"Neoplasms" deaths per 100,000:
.
2019 final: All Races (vs White non-Hispanic) [difference]
- Northeast: All, 58.4 (White: 60.4) [White rate higher, +2.0]
2024 provisional: All Races (vs White non-Hispanic) [race difference]
- Northeast: All, 54.6 (White: 54.1) [White rate LOWER, -0.5]
- Midwest: All, 61.9 (White: 64.8) [White rate higher, +2.9]
- South: All, 65.2 (White: 68.3) [White rate higher, +3.1]
- West: All, 53.1 (White: 52.6) [White rate LOWER, -0.5]
.
___________
.
NET DECLINES, 2019 to 2024
(Note: higher decline is better, as it means fewer cancer deaths):
.
- Northeast, All: -3.8
- Northeast, Whites: -6.3
.
- Midwest, All: -3.6
- Midwest, Whites: -1.1
.
- South, All: -1.7
- South, Whites: -2.7
.
- West, All: -2.9
- West, Whites: -6.1
.
______________
.
If this data is reliable and complete, we can say:
Whites in the 2020s are doing relatively better in the Northeast and West, and doing worse in the Midwest and South (better and worse meaning on cancer-death rates). Nonwhites did worst in the South (probably this means Blacks; more race-specific queries of CDC-Wonder would refine this some more).
The White-Midwest rate particularly stands out: Look again at 2019vs2014, White-Midwest vs All-Midwest. They jumped from near parity to considerably more cancer deaths than their all-population, same-region cohort.
There are probably multiple stories overlapping here.
One narrative-level, Sailerian-simple story suggests itself: At least on the cancer-death front, the various disruptions of the 2020s (look to have) hurt disproportionately Red-State Whites and at least some groups of Nonwhites.
A synthesis of the absolute rates and the relative rates suggests a boring-seeming explanation:
Those who were already in worse health and at relatively lower-socioeconomic levels were hardest hit by whatever the cause or causes of this cancer-rise was and did relatively worse in the first half of the 2020s. For a snappy way to say it, we might re-appropriate "The rich got richer; the poor got poorer": "The healthy got healthier, the unhealthy got 'unhealthier'."
Declining infant/childhood mortality. A lot of people who used to die "merely" through disease and accidents are living just long enough to get cancer.
Between 2023 and 2024?
There is variability between years. Common cold rates and deaths from pneumonia change from year to year. Who knows, maybe some of the viruses have a carcenogenic potential? After all, other viruses, like herpesviruses do have a strong carcenogenic potential.
Besides the graph on the total cancer mortality could suggest that most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked...
This was the been known since the health worker effect was determined when studying atomic veterans in the 1980's. Being healthy enough to join the military is enough to increase one's risk of dying from cancer. Another joke is that the best way to lower one's risk of dying from cancer is driving one's motorcycle in the rain without a helmet.
What are 'atomic vaterans'? Are these people who worked with out nukes or maybe this is the smallest possible division of a veteran?
> the smallest possible division of a veteran?
Yes, as the protonic veteran is no longer a veteran per se
If one is not being just snarky, atomic veterans are service members who participated in atmospheric nuclear tests from 1945 to 1961. When those who were exposed at Bikini Atoll in 1946 started to age into cancer in the 1980's, a large series of epidemiological studies were done on the veterans.
And for the military over all, being in the military increases the chance of dying in a traffic accident.
I was asking but also making a joke. I haven't read those studies but I will look of them. thanks
My late step-monster claimed her USAF weatherman father was at a Bikini test and had to have repeated surgeries in the 90s, removing skin off his head for melanoma because of it. Yet she knew I'd had a melanoma in '91, and that's not the way that cancer works. My sister later found out it was just (the heartbreak of) psoriasis. Woman couldn't stop lying, but he might have been there. A friend's USN dad arranged shore entertainment for a '58 test. He's in his late 80s.
Marine Steve McQueen served on ships filled with asbestos and died of cancer at a fairly early age. Military types tend to be indifferent to human suffering when it comes to the military code.
A better way to think of it is that the DoD does not pursue nor implement every OSHA regulation in a wartime situation. However, veterans die at a higher rate from all cancers compared to the general population because no one who served in the military died of a childhood disease, a congenital defect, or a childhood accident.
This isn't necessarily it, but it is a great example of why this whole question is jumping the gun. I am extremely skeptical that Steve's uptick anything other than random variation.
The very different statement that the NYTimes opinion piece mentions (increasing cases of cancer in youngish people) is very likely to be a math trick such as the example you give. The author jumping straight to environmental causes just shows his instincts for probability and statistics is as poor as the rest of us.
I wonder if we will ever get the stats that would truly be eye opening. I will admit to being a Covid vax skeptic right up front. That said... I can't help but notice that for the first time in our extended family, a young child of 13 was diagnosed with leukemia a year and a half ago. Just this week, a neighbor's 14 year old daughter was diagnosed with bone cancer. The link? Democrat parents that went fully head on into having those kids Covid vaccinated. Will the stat showing cancer rates among the Covid children vaxxed/unvaxxed ever be shown? I'm not counting on it.
What are the most pro-vax and anti-vax states? You tell me and I'll look up their death rates in 2019 and 2024. I haven't done this already so I look forward to finding out.
My cancer examples are Maryland and Nevada, but I don't know if that's relevant. Wouldn't the most pro-vax be regions like New England? They were double masking before double masking became a thing. Husband's college friend lives in Connecticut and I can verify they were over the top insane up there. Give Connecticut a try?
Speaking of New England... many years ago, my family lived in the Boston suburbs for a couple of years while my wife worked at MIT. We moved back to Texas but I never canceled my subscription to the neighborhood mailing list, so I saw all of the crazy Covid chatter that was going back and forth.
The best one was a lady who asked that people not jog or bike in the street past her house, because people exercising breathe more heavily and therefore someone infected would be putting the rest of the neighborhood at higher risk.
This devolved into a full-on argument between people who said she was crazy and others(!) who said she had a point, so why not be careful?
I saved that email chain because it was pretty much perfect.
Steve DEFINITELY needs to look at Connecticut :)
I bet it's a fun read. What goes through the leftist mind, especially the female leftist mind, is very comical.
Okay, Maryland's "malignant neoplasm" (i.e., cancer) death rate for age 0 to 49 declined from 13.5 in 2019 to 13.3 in 2024, while its cancer death rate in Nevada went from 14.4 to 16.0.
Now doubly curious about Connecticut
Connecticut had 230 deaths of cancer under age 50 in 2019 and 229 deaths in 2024.
Hmmm. This all might be worth revisiting when the 2025 stats come in.
Here is a great example of the relatively small absolute numbers we are talking about. Are you sure a change of a few deaths per 100,000 in such a small cohort is actually reflective of a change in the underlying reality? Almost definitely not.
Wait... what about stats that show cancer incidences/reportings rather than deaths? I think that is the number that might be surprising. The two personal examples I cited aren't dead - yet.
I dunno. You tell me.
It the 2nd quarter of 2025. The covid vax was introduced at the very end of the 4th quarter of 2020. If it's really killing people en masse, you ought to have some evidence for that by now.
Nobody seems to, however.
I accept the challenge - I'll look into cancer incidences. I think that is where the numbers are showing up.
WTF are you talking about, Steve? The mortality rate has been running 5-10% above the baseline ever since the end of 2022. And this is with COVID clearing out the most frail elderly all by itself.
I'm with you WRT it causing the (probably imaginary) increase in cancer deaths. The only evidence that might point to a problem with the vaccine (might, MIGHT!) is the mysterious and yet unexplained excess mortality that continued to show in stats long after the pandemic ended. I would have expected negative excess deaths after two years of excess deaths...but that didn't happen. Quite the opposite. why? I don't know if anyone is even looking into it.
Yes, covid vaccine has been introduced around year end 2020/2021. However, it took about half a year ? before youngish white people became vaccinated. Also studies from Chernobyl with exposure to radioactive iodine suggest that there is like a 6-8 year lead between exposure and peak cancer.
Steve's analysis is about deaths. The article he cited was talking about increased case rates over the decades. As Steve pointed out, treatment get slightly better over time and it looks like in that age group those advances overcame the increases in case numbers. Then that progress slowed down in recent years. Is that because the number of cases suddenly went up more than it had on average? We cannot tell from the numbers presented.
Looks like the least vaxed state is Wyoming. I would compare to Vermont, which is among the most vaxed states and has fewer demographic confounds.
What about West-Virginia?
My uneducated guess would be that it might mirror the Dem/Rep divide amongst the white population. So may be WV and Wyoming anti-vax, Minnesota pro-vax? But am just guessing.
ehhhhh- maybe except the thing about humans is that we are great at noticing patterns. We're so good at it in fact, that we notice patterns that aren't real. This is why medical researchers have developed standards for looking into questions like these. Almost inevitably it turns out to be just random distributions. Those tend to clump more than people think.
Looks like the timing of the rise matches pretty closely with the Covid “vaccines.” Maybe that would be a good place to look? 🤷🏼
Kinda seems like whether one is willing to look at this as a strong possibility (along with other factors, so I’m not discounting other things in the modern environment) depends pretty often on age and whether one has had the vax or not.
I say age due to older generations having far more trust in our American institutions, especially medical. And, of course, those who didn’t get the covid jab were already more skeptical.
But doesn’t the fact that research into the MRNA shots and their long term effects gets suppressed as if it is in the same category as group differences in intelligence when it comes to peer-reviewed studies a clue about something?
What are the most pro-vax counties (Santa Clara, CA?) and the most anti-vax counties (McDowell, WV?)? You show me which one you want think would be most affected and I'll look up their total death rates in 2019 vs. 2024 for you.
I'm fascinated to find out.
I hear you, but given the percentages that were covid vaxed are so high throughout the US and most of the rest of the world, combined with the fact that cancer rates (especially only among and age cohort) are so small, comparing rates between the lowest vaxed nation with the highest vaxed nation would produce far more accurate results.
Plus, just off the top of my head, I’d assume the CA county you named had much better health than what is likely some rural WV county, so that wouldn’t necessarily be an apples to apples comparison. The same would apply if we compared national rates between the US versus Afghanistan.
It looks like based on your graph, the aggregate in the US of before covid vaxed versus after covid vaxed at minimum warrants further research. Plus, this was a new technology that technically isn’t even a vax that was rushed through. It seems like due diligence requires looking into the long term effects. Maybe the white fibrous clots, the “died suddenly” phenomenon, turbo cancers, and more could be linked. I’m not saying it is definite. It’s a question that warrants an empirical answer given it affects a huge portion of the world’s population.
Give me some examples of places that in 2024 paid the cost for vax enthusiasm and some places that were wisely skeptical of the vax and I'll look up any sets of cause-of-death rate you want.
I'm not going to propose places myself because I've done that before and people got mad at me for supposedly rigging the analysis.
So you tell me, and then I'll look it up.
But not until after you commit yourself to a theory I can test.
Ok. I’m just going off the top of my head here. I’d say Australia would be a good candidate for a vaxed to the max nation, and preferring a comparable population, I’m not sure which would be the least vaxed. Therefore, I’ll go with the US, and perhaps we could add another data point by throwing in Sweden.
This may show nothing, or it may show something. Regardless, it is not unlikely all show an uptick or at least slowing down of lowering rates given the widespread vaxing. Of course, that won’t prove either perspective the correct one.
Again, while it is not good policy to have a “shoot first ask questions later” policy for a drug using not thoroughly tested technology that is shot into a huge portion of the world’s population, it is definitely worthwhile to get the data on long term effects of the jab.
And I say it’s not unlikely all will show an increase given they all have huge proportions of their populations covid vaxed.
A skeptic could interpret that as “its other environmental factors because this one was vaxed 90% and this one was only 70%, yet they all show similar increases,” while the vax blamer would say “it’s the vax! See they all had increases around the same time.”
Hence the need for top notch research, which I think is a reasonable position.
Either way, the rise in cancer rates is higher in vulnerable populations due to systemic white racism. Don’t bother checking that one. Alternative explanations have been thoroughly debunked. Lol
Please propose a state or a county in the USA I can check out for you.
Sunflower County, MS, Greene County AL, McDowell County WV, Warren County, PA, Medina County, OH, Starr County TX, San Miguel County NM, Oglala Lakota County SD and Baltimore City MD.
Oh. I’m sorry. I misunderstood. When you said places, you meant in the USA. That makes sense given the access to data. Plus, if I recall correctly, Australia hoards its data jealously. Lol
Honestly, I certainly don’t know Covid vax rates by county (and state versus state would be better), so any guess would be based on politics of the state. Lefties were more likely to take the vax, so if I must choose, I’d say Vermont for high uptake and Wyoming for lower (though probably still high).
Nonetheless, I don’t think perspectives can be changed based on what mostly amounts to anecdotal evidence, but I’d be interested in what the data points are. Thank you, Mr. Sailor.
One of West Virginia's little acknowledged problems is obesity. Obesity tends to bring on more heart ailments and cancer. Two West Virginia anecdotes. I bought two lambs from a farmer three years ago. He was 63, way overweight and almost bragged that he had had three heart attacks. His wife and daughter were fatter than he was. And one of the first West Virginians to die of Covid was 24. He weighed over 400 pounds.
> His wife and daughter were fatter than he was
Did they have pretty faces at the very least?
NO!
What I found compelling was that the two women would be in bad circumstances whenever the man died, an event which would probably happen rather soon.
Not if you manned up and did the right thing ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
" comparing rates between the lowest vaxed nation with the highest vaxed nation would produce far more accurate results."
no it wouldn't. In fact it would make the results far more likely to be swamped by unknown numbers of unknown other differences between the nations.
The COVID vax started five years ago. I'm no expert (psych! yes I am) but no way is that enough time or exposure to cause a noticeable uptick in cancer deaths. If this turns out to be the answer, I'll eat my hat.
It would also affect older people too, if it was related to Covid somehow.
you'd think but then there could be other factors...all these are very difficult to disambiguate which is why, even if it turns out death rates are rising for real, one should be skeptical assigning blame to his own hobbyhorse (I'm looking at you RFK jr)
The article I linked to at the WSJ has better data and it shows the trend starting well before Covid.
Archived copy:
https://archive.is/4pZYS
Normally I would agree with you, but the new phenomenon physicians seem to have colloquially named “turbo cancers” that are popping up quickly in all ages makes me think it much more possible now.
Yes, some amount of time will still be needed to result in actual deaths, but there are differences apart from the rate of spread. The mRNA jabs cause our cells to produce a protein foreign to our bodies (the spike protein we’ve all heard of). Messing with programming our DNA to produce these spike proteins may have many consequences of which we are unaware. We cannot be certain.
What we really need is all the data on rates before and after the intro of the vax AND the ability to separate the data between those who received it versus those who didn’t, but for some reason they don’t want to collect this data, or they at least won’t acknowledge it and allow the public to access it.
Regardless of what turns up, these issues, not just cancers, should be investigated and the results shared in a manner accessible to the public. That seems the very least they could do given they injected the vast majority of people with a barely tested drug, and governments gave them immunity from any liability for negative consequences.
I had never heard of turbo cancers and looked it up. It traces to one doc claiming cancers are popping up quickly and spreading fast. I can't find any papers documenting either phenomenon and it doesn't make sense anyway. What does it mean for a cancer to pop up fast? People have always been diagnosed with cancers before they had symptoms. Isn't that the only thing popping up fast could mean? There have always been fast spreading (after Dx) cancers. Not only does it not sound new (aside from the cute name) I don't see how we could possibly know if something like that were new. It's bunk unless you can show me something I haven't thought of.
The mRNA jabs cause our cells to produce a protein foreign to our bodies (the spike protein we’ve all heard of)--also not new. This is what every virus ever does. That's pretty much the characteristic of viridae- they hijack your DNA transcription/translation machinery to make their own proteins.
And a lot of them stick around and even integrate into your genome and continue to force you to make their proteins forever. I'm pretty sure some can even be passed on to to the next generation. I think we have ancient viruses sticking around.
I'm also nearly certain the mRNA vaccine cannot do that. it doesn't have a reverse transcriptase so it would need something already in your body to manage it. Complex systems and all so I wouldn't say definitely not but if it happens we should be able to find it with current technology--where are the papers?
Your body is a lot more resilient to these tiny insults than you think. You are only focusing on this one because it was in the news in your face and political.
It is interesting that higher height is associated with higher cancer risk.
My (layman) theory is that height is caused by more growth hormone, which is a stress hormone, which leads to skeletal growth but also undifferentiated growth of all cells.
Cancer is caused by stress on the cell, which then begins to grow.
(Stress in the widest sense of Selye: “The nonspecific response of the body to any demand for change.”)
In general, I would say: an increase in cancer in society signifies an increase of stress in society.
And we experience that in many parts of life.
Or maybe taller people have more cells that can go wrong?
I'm 6'4", and I had NHL cancer in 1996.
Kudos to you Steve for pointing out more than once that tall people have greater cancer risk.
Height (particularly in males) is generally seen as an unalloyed good.
I'm tall, but being tall mostly seems like a dumb female thing. Being tall practically killed me 28 years ago.
Yeah caring about height wasn’t a Big Thing in the 20th century but seems massive today
That would be an argument only if cancer is random without influence by the environment, like a random mutagenesis.
This was once the hypothesis, but mostly founded in ideology or the acknowledgement of our ignorance.
There are not many indications that this is a good hypothesis. E.g. elephants ave not more cancer than mice; some cells are much more prone to become cancerous.
There are other theories of cancer, e.g. cancer as a metabolic disease, where the number if cells have no influence. E.g. Warburg.
Tall people do get more cancer:
https://www.wcrf.org/about-us/news-and-blogs/why-taller-people-are-at-greater-risk-of-cancer/
One may want to take an online course on cancer biology. It is much more complicated the stress on cells.
Everyone needs to remember that five years is not long enough for any substance in the environment to be an initiator of cancer and for the cancer to be diagnosed. It used to be that 10 years as a minimum.
And certainly not to die of it.
We will never know. Why? 1) Too many factors. 2) Corrupt and rigid systems. 3) Limits to statistical analysis and inference. 4) Limits on data (See point 2)
And not to be mean, but everyone’s pet theories are getting to be tiresome.
I dunno.
Why don't you tell me what your theory about death rates is and I'll look up what the facts are?
I don’t have a theory. On one side of my family/friend groups I have militant anti-vaxers telling me one thing, while another group who believe everything the government tells them (proud adherents of The Science) telling me something else. One’s head begins to spin.
My first assumption would be the data is showing a random walk. If that turns out not to be true and Im asked to add my own pet theory into the melting pot I would surmise it has something to do with lifestyles/changes in consumption that our bodies can’t handle from an evolutionary perspective. (Yes I listen to the Weinsteins)
Of course the Covid MRNA Vax, the Age of Netflix, factory farming, increased number of hours flying at 35,000 feet, sanitized environments, exposure to trace chemicals that didn’t exist 100 years ago and adding High Fructose Corn Syrup to the top of the food chain would all qualify. If I had to choose based on a common theme of inflammation I would go with obesity and our sedentary lifestyles.
I will go look up whatever your theory is, just, please, come up with a theory.
IIRC, theory is step 4 of the process not step 1.
I mean, I realize it's just the internet and we're all just speculating on a hypotenuse here but it honestly sounds like your mind is made up: it wasn't the jab no how, no way.
Probably it's a confluence of factors, maybe including the fact that we told everyone not to go to the doctor for two years unless they had symptoms of a respiratory virus.
The best thing
Similar to BrettBaker I’m guessing it has to something to do with more biodiversity of the 45 to 49 age cohort (for various reasons). We are just producing more Lemons. The recent death of Val Kilmer reminds you how cancer can strike anyone and it just seems so random. Of course he was an Hollywood A-Lister, so maybe lifestyle had an effect.
Kilmer was a heavy smoker.
Since this seems to be the crowd to hear this: My son goes to Hopkins. They were one of the most stringent/bullying universities about mandating the Covid vaccine (one of the last to abandon it, too). I wrote an air tight religious exemption, since medical exemptions were being denied left and right. I held my breath when my son submitted it. They approved it in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! Makes you wonder if they even took the virus seriously.
I wonder how many college students everywhere could have been spared, had they not been scared and threatened into not making an attempt.
It has been pretty clear for a while that there is a relationship between the immune system and cancer. It has also been pretty clear - although not very well publicized - that the mechanism of the mRNA vaccines basically spoils the immune system from the inside out from overuse because the pathogen never goes away. Whereas a normal infection enters the body once and eventually gets killed off, the mRNA - contrary to what was expected - is constantly making spike proteins and "infecting" the body. Basically, the covid spike protein becomes an "allergy" that the body gets used to. But, instead of something relatively benign like pollen or latex, it's an allergy to a very nasty pathogen that wreaks great damage on the body.
It doesn't take an immunology degree to see that if the immune system is degraded and begins to lose its effectiveness, cancer cells that would have usually been immediately ushered away instead are allowed to grow into tumors and the host develops full-on cancer.
First it was acute injuries like blood clots and aneurisms, now it's long term damage like cancer. The covid vaccine and the rush to inject a large portion of the population with it multiple times with very little to no long term safety data - we are living through the "long term" right now - is going to be the biggest scandal in the history of mankind.
Me personally, I resisted the pressure and never got the shot, despite being hospitalized for a week and almost dying. I knew it was a mania and I could tell there was no long-term data for either that "vaccine" specifically or mRNA technology generally, and I knew it was risky so I declined to get the shot. And now, I have no worries whatsoever about having a "time bomb" in my body. It's one of my proudest moments in life.
You want to talk about stress? Being someone who rushed out to get the shot multiple times and now knowing that the likelihood of all of these nasty side effects that could pop up someday... THAT would be stressful.
Vaccine adoption for senior citizens was pretty uniformly high across the country IIRC. But for younger cohorts there was much more variation. If the Covic vaccines are to blame it might be worth investigating whether cancer rates are uniform between blue and red zip codes.
Indeed.
Just propose a theory and I will check it out for you.
Need covid vax info for people with cancer.
If it is Covid vaccine or something about Covid itself, wouldn’t there be an increase in older populations too? I doubt this theory. Plus see my other comment. The WSJ has stats showing the increase predates Covid.
Everyone caught a virus so novel it could only have been cooked up in the Wuhan lab and the cancer rates went up a couple of year's later?
If the person you're asking doesn't consider Covid the main suspect, you're asking the wrong person.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S092544392400557X
Interesting link. But this not limited to young people.
Isn’t it possible that variations in rates of detected cancers would be caused primarily by variations in cancer detection efforts?
I didn’t know I had stage 4 lung cancer until I walked (very slowly) into an emergency room with a collapsed lung. Who knows how long I have had it, and I’m an oldster who gets annual checkups. I assume younger adults would be even more likely to walk around with cancers undetected.
Did covid cause many more young adults to visit a clinic where detection might occur?
Death is pretty serious.
Yes, but it’s a rich source of black humor!
(and it’s easier to laugh when immunotherapy is working its’ magic!)
Best wishes. I’ve read that immunotherapy can work very well.
The question you should ask is not whether more cancers were detected among the living, but whether for any reason more deaths were coded as cancer deaths among the dead.
Steve Sailer has said he only has 100% (or near-100%) trust in police data when it comes to homicides, because realistically there is not much way to explain away a corpse or have murder-victims slip through the data-cracks.
How many homicides are wrongly filed away as suicides? A favorite in detective fiction, with an occasional fake in the other direction.
I can't click on the like button for this one. I wish you all remaining hope.
I think COVID itself or the vaccine seem the most likely given the timing though of course it could be a coincidence. If you’re looking for candidates, I nominate Utah and New England. Both fairly wealthy and healthy populations. Here in Utah, vaccine uptake among children seemed pretty low (no mandates, many children infected naturally since schools remained open).
Cellphones could be another, either directly through something woo-adjacent like “radiation”, or through isolation/sedentary behavioral impacts.
If it’s truly a multigenerational build up though it’s gotta be the food/additives/pesticides/ etc. are the increases global or specific to the USA? That could help isolate whether it’s something like e.g. glyphosate amounts in food supply.
It looks like Massachusetts cancer deaths under 50 went up from 11.7 to 11.9 from 2019 to 2024 while Utah cancer deaths went up from 10.0 to 10.7.
Seems pretty nominal to me.
What does it look like for the under-18s? The population pyramids between the regions are almost inverted.
Pretty tiny sample sizes for cancer deaths under-18.
Steve, check the link given by “Some Anon”. It shows a link between Covid itself and cancer.
At the CDC Wonder site, I see 2024 is listed as "Provisional." Does that mean final results will go up slightly?
(For some reason in the USA of late, there is always some laggard-data that takes months to get around to integrating.)
Or is it possible the 2024 number would go DOWN on the transition from "provisional" to "final"?
I dunno.
At individual level cause-of-death is rarely revised.
I’d say the provisional tag is more likely down to counties or states or whatever not getting their numbers in on time.
We wouldn't expect a large jump in per-capita rates, then. Changes of tenth-of-a-point here, a tenth there, would be possible if a large tranche of missing data with much-higher or much-lower death-rates get dumped into the pile. Not likely enough to change Steve's graph in a meaningful way at all.
Look at Japan and Israel. I believe they were the most highly vaxxed countries.
The first plot seems to show a flattening decline over this 25-year period. Why does 2024 stand out to you? Is it because this is the first point at which the year-to-year change is positive? That could be within the noise (have you computed statistical significance of this change?).
Yeah, 2024 is then first year cancer deaths went up>
Well, it doesn't look like something dramatic happened in 2024, just a continuation of the current trend--which looks go back at least to 2017, if not much earlier. Hard to make inferences from that....
The Midwest and South, hardest hit:
I searched the CDC Wonder database for 2019 and 2024 under these parameters:
.
Ages 45-49
White non-Hispanic only
"Neoplasms" deaths per 100,000:
.
____________
2019 final, Whites:
- Northeast: 60.4
- Midwest: 65.9
- South: 71.0
- West: 58.7
____________
.
.
____________
2024 provisional, Whites (+/- change since 2019):
- Northeast: 54.1 (-6.3)
- Midwest: 64.8 (-1.1)
- South: 68.3 (-2.7)
- West: 52.6 (-6.1)
____________
.
White cancer-death rates in the Northeast and West regions declined at about the expected rate (i.e., something near the late-1990s-to-late-2010s trajectory-line). The Midwest and South are the anomaly,. They declined much less. (The South declined slightly more, but from a higher 2019-rate.) Explanations for the rise in cancer-deaths in the 2020s have to fit this fact.
To most people, the changes might be unimpressive. Especially against the alarmist claims of huge increases in cancer deaths being imminent by the mid-2020s. The higher 2024 rate is "only" a return to the ca.2016 rate. And in 2016, few were heard expressing much concern about a cancer crisis. Not in absolute terms. The problem, naturally, is whether the 2024 rates augur ever-higher rates to come.
The changes do, anyway, amount to HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of extra cancer deaths, when extrapolated out to other age groups, across the 2020s. (And for every death, there are even more with life-disrupting cancer battles that they survived with varying levels of life-disruption and long-term effects.)
The Median Man of the 2020s exists on a slightly lower-notch on Life's Lottery than he should. This is a breach of the Grand Bargain of our capitalist-liberal-multiracial-democracy system.
.
__________
.
.
Above I gave only the White rates by region. For comparison with the All-Race rates:
.
_______________
Ages 45-49
ALL RACES
"Neoplasms" deaths per 100,000:
.
2019 final: All Races (vs White non-Hispanic) [difference]
- Northeast: All, 58.4 (White: 60.4) [White rate higher, +2.0]
- Midwest: All: 65.5 (White: 65.9) [White rate higher, +0.4]
- South: All: 66.9 (White: 71.0) [White rate higher, +4.1]
- West: All: 56.0 (White: 58.7) [White rate higher, +2.7]
.
___________
.
2024 provisional: All Races (vs White non-Hispanic) [race difference]
- Northeast: All, 54.6 (White: 54.1) [White rate LOWER, -0.5]
- Midwest: All, 61.9 (White: 64.8) [White rate higher, +2.9]
- South: All, 65.2 (White: 68.3) [White rate higher, +3.1]
- West: All, 53.1 (White: 52.6) [White rate LOWER, -0.5]
.
___________
.
NET DECLINES, 2019 to 2024
(Note: higher decline is better, as it means fewer cancer deaths):
.
- Northeast, All: -3.8
- Northeast, Whites: -6.3
.
- Midwest, All: -3.6
- Midwest, Whites: -1.1
.
- South, All: -1.7
- South, Whites: -2.7
.
- West, All: -2.9
- West, Whites: -6.1
.
______________
.
If this data is reliable and complete, we can say:
Whites in the 2020s are doing relatively better in the Northeast and West, and doing worse in the Midwest and South (better and worse meaning on cancer-death rates). Nonwhites did worst in the South (probably this means Blacks; more race-specific queries of CDC-Wonder would refine this some more).
The White-Midwest rate particularly stands out: Look again at 2019vs2014, White-Midwest vs All-Midwest. They jumped from near parity to considerably more cancer deaths than their all-population, same-region cohort.
There are probably multiple stories overlapping here.
One narrative-level, Sailerian-simple story suggests itself: At least on the cancer-death front, the various disruptions of the 2020s (look to have) hurt disproportionately Red-State Whites and at least some groups of Nonwhites.
A synthesis of the absolute rates and the relative rates suggests a boring-seeming explanation:
Those who were already in worse health and at relatively lower-socioeconomic levels were hardest hit by whatever the cause or causes of this cancer-rise was and did relatively worse in the first half of the 2020s. For a snappy way to say it, we might re-appropriate "The rich got richer; the poor got poorer": "The healthy got healthier, the unhealthy got 'unhealthier'."
What is it that is "obvious" about the observation/claim that Kennedy is not cut out to run a big agency?