By Carla Peeters at Brownstone dot org.

As women used to live longer than men even during severe famines and epidemics, a continued post-pandemic increase in female mortality and disabilities can't stay hidden or neglected.

During the Covid pandemic in many High-Income Countries, injuries, disabilities, and all-cause mortality started to rise above expectations. In 2020, the gender gap in mortality widened due to an observed increased mortality in men. While in 2021 male health seemed to bounce back to earlier trends, mortality and disabilities in women continue to rise above earlier trends and are not expected to solve themselves soon.

This might cause a fundamental and permanent change in the dynamics of the gender mortality gap.

Recent decisions on austerity measures for budgets on female health and welfare will exacerbate this hidden disaster. Instead, Public Health Experts and CEOs of insurance companies need to take their moral responsibility and turn to smart investments in female health, addressing all gender disparities, to reverse a downward spiral in global population health.

A Sudden Rise in Excess Mortality and Disabilities

In September 2024, Swiss Re published in their annual report, "Many countries worldwide still report elevated death in their population today." This impact appears independent of healthcare system or population health. In the pessimistic model, Swiss Re would expect excess deaths to continue for another decade. There is also likely a degree of excess mortality underreporting.

CFOs from other life insurance companies confirmed that experienced mortality rates are broadly in line with this report. A skyrocketing increase in disability claimants since 2020 is another puzzling factor why CEOs of insurance companies are facing major problems with their financial model. The growth in demand is much lower, and the number of people making claims is much higher than expected. Declining revenues may soon hit the corporate bottom line.

For the first time in 80 years, the stocks from insurer Centene Medicaid plummeted in July 2025 by 41% after the insurer had to withdraw its full financial guidance because previous estimates were way off.

The analysis from insurance companies is comparable with earlier reports from Phinance Technologies, which analyzed publicly available data from the US and UK using various methods. Other independent analysts observed similar trends.

In recent years, hundreds of peer-reviewed articles discuss excess mortality and adverse events of special interest in various countries of pandemic measurements and after Covid-19 vaccinations.

Boston University just published the all-cause mortality in the US as compared to other High-Income Countries and showed that excess death rates peaked in 2021 and declined in 2022 and 2023 but remained substantially higher than pre-pandemic rates, especially in the age group 25-44 years. Mortality among US adults aged 25-44 years was 2.6 times higher as compared to other High-Income Countries.

A recent opinion from Kakeya et al. describes a significant increase in excess deaths after repeated Covid-19 vaccinations. Japan is the country with the highest per capita rate of messenger ribonucleic acid mRNA vaccination doses in the world.

A systematic review on Covid-19 mechanisms of injury and death compiled with autopsy confirmation by a physician application suggests there is a likelihood of a causal link between Covid-19 vaccines and deaths.

While there are studies that conclude there is no significant increase in stillbirths when women were vaccinated with the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine during pregnancy, a study based on VAERS data shows a significant increase. Another, not yet peer-reviewed, study indicates that Covid-19 vaccination with dose 1 during weeks 8-13 of pregnancy was associated with 3.9 fetal losses above expected for every 100 exposed pregnancies.

A study in the Czech Republic on live births of vaccinated versus non-vaccinated women demon...