First, let me give you the hidden bottom line of this story. If you are a man or a boy, nature has cut your lifespan off at the knees. Now for the news.
On August 31st, the CDC dropped some startling statistics about your probable lifespan and mine. Life expectancy in America has gone down a shocking three years in the 30 months since Covid was declared a pandemic.
Yahoo News calls this plunge from an average life expectancy of nearly 79 years to a mere 76 years the worst two year drop in a century. Capital Public Radio News in Sacramento says that to find a comparable reduction in the American lifespan, you have to go back to “the early 1940s during the height of World War II.” Which means that Covid has cut our American life expectancy by as much as the most savage world war in history.
What’s worse, in the last two years, lifespans went down in every other advanced nation on earth thanks to Covid. But the lifespans in many of these nations are rebounding. Our lifespan is not bouncing back. Yet. There are small signs of recovery peeking through in the statistics for 2022.
Experts hint that there’s a reason for the sluggishness of America’s recovery. It’s the fact that we have political movements dedicated to dodging public health measures like vaccination and mask wearing.
But buried in the new statistics is something even more disturbing than vaccine hatred.
The life expectancy of women has gone down to 79 years. But the life expectancy of men has plummeted to a measly 73 years. In other words, women are living six years longer than men. And the New York Times says that, “The longevity gap between the sexes has been increasing for more than a decade.”
What the heck is going on here? Biology. For the details, take a look at the chapter called “The Expendability of Males” in my book The Lucifer Principle: a Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. What does the Lucifer Principle chapter say?
That ever since the male and female divide first showed up roughly 2.5 billion years ago, nature has used males as expendable gambling chips, as throwaways, as ways to take risks and probe for new possibilities, as antennae of a collective learning machine, disposable antennae.
Just take a look at the way nature tosses maleness away when we humans procreate. A woman has a single egg moving down her fallopian tubes hoping for a mate. Yes, a female human has just one receptive egg at a time. But a male human produces roughly a hundred million sperm with every sex act. Each sperm cell is an independent being, a unique swimming spark of life. But only one of those sperm will get to inseminate the woman’s egg. Yes, only one. The other 999,999,999 sperm will be left to die.
But that’s just the beginning of the way nature stacks the odds against males. Male fetuses are far more likely than females to be killed by miscarriages and still births. Once males get out of the womb and start to grow up, they are four times more likely to lose their lives to homicide. Add to that the fact that the immune systems of men don’t work as well as those of women. And the fact that men who are missing one arm of their Y chromosome, missing one arm of their male chromosome, live 12 years longer than men whose male chromosome is intact. In other words, the best way to extend your life span if you are a man is to lose a vital genetic component of your maleness.
What’s more, males are twice as likely to die of lung cancer, suicide, pulmonary disease, cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease as females. According to today’s CDC report, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, and drug overdoses, all diseases that attack males in particular, are among the leading non-Covid causes of the drop in American life expectancy.
So, yes, we Americans have lost three years of potential life because of Covid. But don’t forget the hidden bottom line: Being female gives you six years more of life. Being male is poison.
References:
CDC Vital Statistics Rapid Release, Number 023 (August 2022)
www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/health/life-expectancy-covid-pandemic.html
https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments-in-2020
https://www.cnet.com/health/us-life-expectancy-declined-again-in-2021-cdc-says/
Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: a Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995. https://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Principle-Scientific-Expedition-History/dp/B005DIDY1G/
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Howard Bloom has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am et every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute .
