Death Takes a Working Vacation in the U.S.

I’m sure you noticed all the positive headlines in the mainstream media this past week about the death rate in the U.S. falling to an all-time low last year.

Given the creative ways the Trump regime is trying to kill us off — more polluted air and water, an upside down food pyramid that pushes full-fat dairy and beef, going to war against Iran, murdering people who protest immigration policies, reducing or eliminating access to health insurance, gutting medical research funding, eliminating food programs for kids, firing people who inspect our food supply, declaring global warming a hoax and nixing green energy initiatives, taking limits off cancer-causing herbicides, imposing vaccines schedules based on conspiracy theories, etc. — I’m surprised as you are at the new data.

That’s assuming that we can trust the data, given this group of bad actors running the government.

That said, here are the numbers, according to new data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

• 3,094,593 people died in the U.S. in 2025. That’s a rate of 689.2 per 100,000 people.
• By comparison, 3,072,666 people died in 2024. That’s a rate of 722.1 per 100,000 people.
• That’s an increase of 0.7% in actual deaths, but a drop in the death rate of 4.6%.

The death rate dropped for all ages and sexes. The death rate dropped for all races and ethnicities except for American Indian and Alaska Natives and for Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders.

The death rate in 2025 was the lowest recorded in the U.S., according to the NVSS, which did not offer an explanation for the record low rate of people dying here.

On the surface, that’s all good news. You have to dig a little deeper to find the bad news, and I did.

The top seven leading causes of death in the U.S. in both 2025 and 2024 were, in rank order:

1. Heart disease
2. Cancer
3. Unintentional injury
4. Stroke
5. Chronic lower respiratory diseases
6. Alzheimer disease
7. Diabetes

Coming in at No. 8 in 2025 as a leading cause of death in the U.S. was influenza and pneumonia, with 56,511 deaths. The flu and pneumonia didn’t crack the top 10 in 2024. They were No. 11 in 2024 with 48,139 deaths, according to NVSS data last year. That’s a jump of a whopping 17.4% in just one year.

What do the flu and pneumonia have in common? People can get medically safe and proven-effective vaccines to prevent both of them. Who’s discouraging the use of medically safe and proven-effective vaccines to prevent potentially deadly communicable diseases? The Trump regime, led by the noted anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Expect the flu and pneumonia to move up in the cause of death rankings as more people skip getting vaccinated against them because of deliberate misinformation and disinformation from the top of our government and from online influencers with vested interests.

Will flu and pneumonia ever crack the top 5 causes of death? It would be hard to dislodge heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases from their spots given the fatty upside-down food pyramid and increasingly lax federal regulation of tobacco, smoking and vaping. Unintentional injuries? If people are too dumb to get vaccinated, probably not.

Death didn’t take a holiday last year. It just went on a working vacation.