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Among the world’s towering financial titans is BlackRock, a company with a bigger economy than every country on Earth except the U.S. and China. They manage $10 trillion in assets.
In 2002, BlackRock recruited the brilliant Wall Street careerist Edward Dowd, and soon promoted him to serve as managing director.
Turns out BlackRock made a very good bet on Ed Dowd: the growth fund he managed started at $2 billion. By the time he left BlackRock, it was $14 billion.
His work with BlackRock required a keen ability to understand markets, pick stocks, analyze statistics and identify trends.
In 2021, Dowd found himself withdrawing from Wall Street to study an entirely new kind of trend: the expanding and tragic epidemic of sudden deaths among healthy young people.
Every country dutifully maintains statistics on what’s called “all-cause mortality” — deaths from any cause whatsoever. Whether accidents, disease, suicide, homicide, natural disaster or unexplained deaths, there is a long-established and fairly consistent baseline of all-cause mortality, year over year. Anything above that baseline is considered “excess death.”
In 2021, it was Ed Dowd — not the public health officials that citizens rely upon — but Dowd who brought international attention to the fact that healthy working-age Americans were dying, and dying suddenly, at an alarming rate not seen before.
These excess deaths were not anticipated by insurance actuaries, and weren’t attributed to COVID-19.
Dowd framed the issue in a way I can’t forget:
“From February 2021 to March 2022, millennials experienced the equivalent of a Vietnam War, with more than 60,000 excess deaths. The Vietnam War took 12 years to kill the same number of healthy young people we’ve just seen die in 12 months.”
One after another, reports from life insurance companies confirmed what Dowd was discovering, and in early 2022, he convened a group of insurance industry executives to explore it further.
Later, he recruited expert analysts from around the world, and drawing on data from various official sources in many countries, he and his growing team committed to study the topic from every available vantage point.
In this unusual book, “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” Dowd proves an undeniable and urgent reality, laid out with facts that can be confirmed by any reader, point by point, page by page.
He has helped us all understand something that many powerful people want to deny — and would get away with denying were it not for his skills and integrity.
Anyone who appreciates truth and accuracy owes Ed Dowd their gratitude. He certainly has mine.
