Dr. Pierre Kory: Why We Wrote the USA Today Op-ed on Excess Deaths — and Why We Never Mentioned ‘Vaccines’
In an interview with The Defender, Dr. Pierre Kory said he and his co-author of the USA Today op-ed on excess deaths among young people believe “a concerted investigation is in order.”
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In an op-ed published this month in USA Today, Dr. Pierre Kory and journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer asked, “Why aren’t we searching for answers?” to the question of why so many young people are dying.
Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), and Pfeiffer cited insurance industry data showing a “stunning” 34% more working people, ages 35 to 44, died than expected in the last quarter of 2022, with above-average rates in other working-age groups, too.
The authors drew much of their data on excess deaths from a May report by the Society of Actuaries Research Institute, which concluded, “COVID-19 claims do not fully explain the increase.”
According to Kory and Pfeiffer:
“No one knows precisely what is driving the phenomenon, but there is an inexplicable lack of urgency to find out. A concerted investigation is in order.”
The authors made no mention of COVID-19 vaccines as a possible cause for the rise in deaths.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Kory, a pulmonary and critical care specialist and outspoken critic of the vaccines, explained the absence along with his reasons for writing the op-ed:
“When you see what happened in the youngest age groups, it’s absolutely terrifying. … In general, a stable society has a certain percentage of people dying every month, every year, every day. Those rates are stable over time.
“When you see more people dying than the baseline, it’s considered excess mortality. It’s an increase in the amount of people dying within a population.”
Op-ed would ‘never have seen the light of day’ if COVID vaccines mentioned
In a Substack post, Kory credited Pfeiffer, whom he described as a “fearless and indefatigable investigative journalist,” with the idea for writing the op-ed. Their intent was to raise awareness of an issue they believe is overlooked in public discourse.
“The massive number of post-pandemic deaths has managed to interest only a cadre of data specialists, scientists, physicians and journalists who believe mistakes were made in pandemic management,” Kory wrote. “But why, we ask, has this issue engendered a deafening silence rather than urgently needed, high-level investigation?”
The elephant in the room, according to Kory, is the COVID-19 vaccines. But they couldn’t mention the vaccines by name in the op-ed because, Kory said, otherwise “it would never have been published.”
“We just wanted to bring the question of excess deaths to the forefront,” Kory said. “We didn’t want to try to answer the question. We just wanted to try to ask the question.” He said the fact that a mainstream publication published it “might be a game-changer.”
Although the authors didn’t use the word “vaccine” in the USA Today op-ed, “There is only one explanation for the timing, magnitude and demographics of the deaths,” Kory wrote on Substack.
Kory told The Defender, “You’re left with the question, what could have caused a sudden massive increase in death amongst healthy Americans?”
As for all the other suggested explanations, Kory said:
“You could think of really stupid things like global warming. I don’t think global warming started in the third quarter of 2021 … You could talk about insecticides or environmental toxins. I don’t know that anything was released suddenly in 2021.
“You could think about wartime mobilization. I don’t think we’ve been drafted to Ukraine yet, where our young people are dying on the front lines of Ukraine.”
Kory also dismissed lockdowns as a cause:
“Why would lockdowns suddenly, disproportionately affect the youngest Americans, particularly employed Americans? … It was young working Americans who died more than anyone else, more than those that were outside the labor force. I don’t know how lockdowns would do that.”
Kory also noted that the largest increases in excess deaths were in the third quarter of 2021, when “there hadn’t been lockdowns in this country for at least a year or more.”
Though the Society of Actuaries report didn’t list COVID-19 vaccines as a cause for the rise in excess deaths, Kory wrote that “the sudden, unprecedented rise in life insurance claims in the 3rd quarter of 2021 among the healthiest sector of society — working age, white-collar Americans with group life insurance policies” has one plausible cause:
“What happened in the white-collar workplace at that time? I will give you the only possibilities that could explain such a sudden rise: a series of terrorist attacks, wartime mobilization, or the proliferation of corporate vaccine mandates. As far as I can remember, only one of those events actually took place.”
He told The Defender:
“We can talk about the elephant in the room, which is in the third quarter of 2021. September is when you started to see universities, corporations, companies and the federal government mandate the COVID-19 vaccine.
“In my opinion, there is only one explanation for the excess deaths. It was the proliferation of mandates to get young people vaccinated. I can’t think of anything else temporally associated with these rises than the proliferation of vaccines.”
As clear as this appears to Kory, he doesn’t believe the truth will get through to everyone. “In this ‘misinformation-disinformation’ atmosphere, you’re going to get all the pro-vaxxers, who are going to throw everything at the wall to explain this, because God forbid you blame this on the vaccine,” he said.
Unprecedented number of excess deaths ‘should cause alarms to go off’
Kory told The Defender that excess deaths were evident in 2020, but the difference is “the nature and who’s dying. The excess deaths in 2020 were mostly elderly,” he said. “The big concern is that young people started to die at greatly increased rates, and it happened suddenly … in the third and fourth quarters of 2021, to an extent never seen before.”
“From 2020 through 2022, there were more excess deaths proportionally among white-collar than blue-collar workers: 19% versus 14% above normal,” Kory and Pfeiffer wrote in USA Today. “The disparity nearly doubled among top-echelon workers in the fourth quarter of 2022.”
During the same period, Kory said the data show deaths among white-collar workers reached 39% above normal. Deaths for all employees were 34% higher than baseline. Mortality among 35- to 44-year-olds reached “a stunning” 101% above — or double — the three-year pre-pandemic baseline.
Conversely, “U.S. COVID deaths during that period were 40 percent lower than the previous wave in 2021. This suggests other factors at play,” according to Kory.
While most COVID-19 deaths were recorded among the elderly, now, excess deaths are flat for seniors, while they are soaring for the able-bodied young and employed — a cohort that has traditionally been the healthiest in society. “These deaths should cause alarms to go off,” he said.
“It’s not only that young people started to die at significantly increased rates … it’s that it happened in the healthiest sectors of society,” Kory told The Defender.
In a follow-up post on Substack, Kory wrote, “This higher excess mortality was greatest in government jobs. Does anyone remember a federal mandate for government employees and its contractors to get the COVID jab in the fall of 2021?”
The op-ed also cited similar trends identified in other countries, including the U.K., which saw “more excess deaths in the second half of 2022 than in the second half of any year since 2010,” while in the first quarter of this year, deaths among 20- to 44-year-olds matched “the same period in 2021, the worst pandemic year for that age group.”
And in Australia, “12% more people died than expected in 2022,” Kory wrote, with one-third of the excess deaths being “non-COVID deaths,” a figure described by Australia’s Actuaries Institute as “extraordinarily high.”
Scott Davison, CEO of OneAmerica insurance company cited the 2021 increase in excess deaths in statements made in January 2022 about a 40% increase in life insurance claims in the third quarter of 2021 among 18- to 64-year-olds. Davison said it was “the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business.”
Referencing Davison’s statements, Kory told The Defender that “a 10% rise [in excess deaths] is a 1-in-200-year event. … For the third quarter of 2021, they reported a 38% rise out of nowhere. They’ve never seen that in their industry, and, I would add, outside of wartime.”
‘They do not want this discussion happening in public’
Kory wrote on Substack that “the job of actuaries is to measure statistical trends, not to define the complex dynamics driving them.”
Kory noted that while the life insurance industry is profit-driven, “it is also an industry whose insights have led to a few centuries of life-saving public policies and laws which protect us from a large number of dangers to our health and survival,” including in fire, automobile and maritime safety, worker safety, and medical and health policy.
By not investigating a connection between excess deaths and COVID-19 vaccines though, the “goal of improving patient safety is now likely being threatened,” Kory wrote.
Kory said that historically, an article like the USA Today op-ed bringing forth such “troubling data” would have been met with “public outcry or response from government,” including investigations.
“In the present day, however, under such severe federal regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry, this would be anathema to them,” Kory said.
He added:
“They do not want this discussion happening in public. They do not want the wider public to be discussing whether the vaccines caused — I guess you can use the word ‘genocide.’ They don’t want that discussion in public, and they have incredible powers to suppress the discussion. Their influence over the media is vast.”
Nevertheless, Kory said, “We got a really troubling question with an even more troubling answer printed in a major American newspaper. I don’t think anyone really wants to contemplate the answer, because as soon as you start to contemplate, you have to arrive at the fact that we’re living through a humanitarian catastrophe caused by the global vaccine campaign.”
Kory and Pfeiffer argued governments and regulatory agencies should cooperate with life insurers to investigate this trend at the national and international level. “Without a thorough and collaborative exploration, we can’t know what’s killing us — or how to stop it.”
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