Top-Five Killers of 2020
Post #641
As discovered here, adverse prescription drug reactions make up a larger share of all U.S. deaths than has ever been reported before, likely falling somewhere from 700,000 to 1,200,000 deaths per year. Of all adverse drug events reported to FDA’s FAERS system, 9.17% are fatalities.
Extrapolating that overall percentage to the number of reports in 2020 gives an estimate of death reports at 202,112 reported deaths. Correcting that value by an estimate of 82% under-reporting (18% capture of underlying events) brings the total deaths due to prescription drug reactions in 2020 up to 1,122,847 deaths.
Compare that figure to the 350,000 COVID deaths:
Using the estimate of 18% event capture in the FAERS system, along with the assumption that every event report is 100% legitimate, and that 100% of reports were for prescription drugs, here are the top-five killers of 2020:
prescription drug reactions (1,122,847)
heart disease (690,882)
cancer (598,932)
COVID (345,323)
unintentional injuries (192,176)
If assumptions hold as being roughly true, then for every person who purportedly died from (with?) COVID, more than 3 people died from reaction to a pharmaceutical drug. That means that money spent on reducing the toxicity of prescription drugs could have 3 times the impact, in terms of prevented deaths, as the money spent on COVID.
Reference
[top causes of death in 2020] — Ahmad FB, Anderson RN. The Leading Causes of Death in the US for 2020. JAMA. 2021 May 11;325(18):1829-1830. doi: 10.1001/jama.2021.5469. PMID: 33787821; PMCID: PMC8145781. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8145781/
[plausible range of under-reporting rates is 82% to 98% (2% to 18% capture)] — Hazell L, Shakir SA. Under-reporting of adverse drug reactions : a systematic review. Drug Saf. 2006;29(5):385-96. doi: 10.2165/00002018-200629050-00003. PMID: 16689555. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16689555/
[FAERS dashboard] — FDA. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/questions-and-answers-fdas-adverse-event-reporting-system-faers/fda-adverse-event-reporting-system-faers-public-dashboard