A recently published research letter details the increasing mortality rate of U.S. infants, children, and teenagers.

According to the letter, American children and adolescents are dying at greater rates than those in 16 other high-income countries.

“The literature documents a long-standing health disadvantage in the US relative to other high-income countries, with excess deaths due in part to disproportionately high mortality rates. Few studies have quantified the number of excess deaths that have occurred among US infants, children, and adolescents, and none based on mortality data from recent years,” the research letter reads. “Recent years have seen an increase in youth mortality due to homicide, suicide, and drug overdoses and in all-cause mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-sectional study compared US mortality rates among youths aged 0 to 19 years with those of 16 comparison countries, calculated excess deaths for 1999 to 2019, and examined temporal trends through 2021.”

Researchers compared U.S. morality rates among those aged 0-19 in Australia, Canada, Japan, and 13 European countries.

They found that there were 413,948 excess U.S. deaths during the assessed timeframe.

“Each year, nearly 20,000 deaths among youths ages 0 to 19 years would not have occurred had US youths experienced the median mortality rates of 16 comparison countries,” the authors wrote, according to an analysis from The Defender. “More than half of these deaths involved infants, reflecting disproportionately high US infant mortality rates.”

Dr. Steven Woolf, co-author of the research letter, told NBC News that the “chances of a child surviving to age 20 are now decreasing.”

A 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) found that the “infant mortality rate for the United States in 2022 rose 3% from 2021, the first year-to-year increase in the rate since 2001 to 2002.”

From 2002 to 2021, the U.S. infant mortality rate decreased 22%.

In 2022, the infant mortality rate was 5.60 deaths per 1,000 live births.

A 2021 study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information analyzed infant deaths between 1900-2019 using data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). It found that 78.3% of infant deaths occurred within one week of vaccination.

American Faith reported that global health professor at the University of Southern Denmark Christine Stabell Benn linked childhood vaccines to all-cause mortality risks.

Stabell Benn noted that the vaccine system is “not set up to manage if the vaccine could actually affect the risk of dying from other infections, other diseases.”

“None of the routine childhood vaccines were investigated prior to their introduction for their effect on mortality, and nobody bothered to investigate it,” the professor continued.

“We actually saw and can show repeatedly for some of these vaccines that children who received them, particularly for reasons we don’t really understand yet, girls who received these vaccines, even though they’re protected against sometimes deadly diseases, their all-cause mortality is higher than girls who haven’t been vaccinated yet.”