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Journal by DeathMonkey
But I am perfectly fine with the US hoarding our vaxxes until every American has had the opportunity to get them.
Those companies are free to sell to whomever they want but we got our orders in early and we're currently first in line.
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A shapely CATHOLIC SCHOOLGIRL is FIDGETING inside my costume..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 12 2021, @08:18PM
This is not accurate. It depends on exactly who is measuring (e.g. the UN and CDC give slightly different results) but the US reached its peak life expectancy sometime from 2010-2015 and it's been on a slight downward trend since. Keep in mind the headlines about US life expectancy increasing for the first time in 4 years (back in 2018) were about a year-over-year increase, not an increase over what we reached previously.
I think people mistake why life expectancy increased in the past. It's not because medical technology improved, for the most part, but really simple stuff: clean food, clean water, no wars killing off 3% of the Earth's population at a time, transition away from higher risk manual labor, declines in smoking, and stuff along these lines. Medical technology that wasn't present 40 years ago has had a very small overall effect. This is why when you look at the list [wikipedia.org] of countries by life expectancy lots of countries you might not expect are ahead of the US: Slovenia, Greece, Kuwait, Costa Rica, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Croatia, Turkey, etc. Or for instance why Cyprus has the 6th highest life expectancy in the world.
And similarly the reason Japan is the longest lived is not because of some incredible medical technology but because they're willing to consider things we never would for instance the Metabo Law. Individuals over the age of 40 are regularly measured, and employers/local governments are fined for employees/citizens who have larger than regulated waistlines - 80cm for men, 90cm for women. And individuals who overweight are sent to counseling and retraining. And it works, obviously. But it requires the sort of culture that cares more about reality than ideology. We're, by contrast, going in the exact opposite direction and doing everything we can to make people feel okay about being fat - and we're paying the price for it.