'People are dying' is just a headline to grab eyeballs. More accurate listing of deaths show more young people are dying from recreational drugs than in recent years, when even if you got shot and died from it but had tested positive for coronavirus within the prior 30 days you might have been listed as a COVID-19 death by the CDC. Yet more people are not dying. Of anything.
Even more recreational drug user deaths are not compelling since progressives and their allies in corporate media had to pivot from being anti-vaccine to being supporters of the Big Pharma that saved the world. Not being able to blame medicine for death means they are forced to find new ways to say the modern world is killing us. It's become a challenge. Murders are down nationwide, though still alarmingly high in cities like San Francisco and Chicago. Recreational drug deaths are also down. Obesity, a risk factor for early mortality nearly as great as cigarettes and alcohol - down. Even traffic deaths are down.

Scary-looking, right? You can relax, it is just pretty pictures and then invoking suspect epidemiology to "suggest" the pictures correlate to dementia. It is not science. It is, however, a lot of modern Nature/MacMillan/Scientific American posturing against science, thanks to the Holtzbrinck family that owns those demanding more and more revenue each quarter. Credit: 10.1038/s41591-024-03453-1
How is everyone dying less of everything except old age while environmental groups are claiming we're being killed by science, as are bees, and if we're not dying we're at least having dumber kids due to virtual air pollution? None of those are true.
They don't have evidence on their side, so they manufacture epidemiology. The kind of thing that let activists claim with a straight face that "endocrine disruptors" caused more COVID-19 deaths while vegetarian diets prevented it.
Science and epidemiology are not the same thing. Epidemiology can link anything to anything, and if you are hand-picked to be on an International Agency for Research on Cancer Working Group or a Ramazzini Institute panel, you've already shown you will do what it takes to show something is harming us all. A new paper in Nature Medicine notes they can detect microplastics in our brains and it is "correlated" to dementia. So dementia has gone up, right? No. We certainly detect it earlier, thank you doctors, just like we detect cancer and pregnancy earlier, but there aren't more cases.(1) We know so little about dementia such claims are down near fMRI pictures and surveys in scientific credibility. We know very little over even a centyrt ago but because we can detect everything now, everything gets linked to dementia.
Once upon a time, zero meant less than one part per million. Now we can detect parts per quadrillion. That means tests are 1,000,000,000 times more sensitive than in the past. One billion times more detection now than when 'no detection' occurred 60 years ago. We can literally detect anything in anything. For context, I often compare such cosmic detection being correlated to harm as detecting the effect of a fly's wings on the gravity of the moon. We can detect that. It is there. But does anyone literate think 10,000,000 flies are impacting the moon? A billion? They are not. So it goes with trace microplastics. And ultra-processed foods, and weedkillers 'detected' in urine.
If a journalist "suggests" that alcohol is going to kill you, that is alarming. Yet if the underlying correlation was made using 10,000 shots of Scotch force-fed into the stomach of a mouse, are you as scared? No, nor should you be, but it is common for epidemiologists to use studies that have five(!) orders of magnitude, 10,000 is the same as 1, for dose and declare a chemical a hazard. It is the same if a "linked to" claim was made using a fantastic number of survey responses and finding "statistical significance" between some disease and "ultraprocessed" food, whatever that means.
We're healthier whether activists want to accept it or not, for the same reason we are wealthier even though socialists and communist insist we are not; science and technological progress. A world of solar panels and organic food is a world where there is a giant chasm between the rich and poor.(2) Poor people instead have the modern world and are better off for it.
We'd be better off with fewer murders so it is understandable why Democrats want to create more laws and even made a gun control activist the vice-chair of their political party; it is overwhelmingly Democrats murdering people, there has to be some liberal guilt about that. Obesity is simply solvable by cultural maturity. Animals have a biological mandate to eat as much as they can because we don't know when our next meal will be. It is only two generations since progressives were insisting a Population Bomb would lead to mass starvation and governments would topple due to food riots.(3) Over time, food will become a reliable commodity and fewer people will binge.
Car accidents will really decline once we roll out enough autopilot cars that we cross the 'herd immunity' threshold for that, but expect environmentalists to demand perfect be the enemy of the good and block those the way they do fire prevention in California. 200,000 dead per year in preventable accidents, or $250 billion in damage because state law prevents cleaning up dead trees or adding more water storage, is a worthy sacrifice if they can continue to make money opposing science.
NOTES:
(1) Two generations ago, if a woman missed a period or even two, and it came back nothing was made of it. Now we can detect pregnancy much faster - 10 days - rather than the two to three months that was once the norm. What was once a missed period can now be termed a miscarriage. An epidemiologist with an agenda could then correlate that to organic food or solar panels or anything else that is also more prevalent now. If you think correlation of miscarriages to solar panels sounds ridiculous, you know why scientists laugh at the notion that weedkillers can cause human cancer. It requires the exact same lack of understanding about the real world.
(2) Old wealth gaps gave us Versailles and the Sistine Chapel and all those royal palaces in England, but those will never be built again, because Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Warren Buffett combined couldn't afford it. Rules of minor countries could then.
(3) One government almost went under due to food - Sri Lanka, and that was because they believed well-fed white people in environmental groups who insisted organic food could sustain the world. A few months later, they changed their minds.
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