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It’s all over the media — alcohol is the new killer of Australians. “Alcohol-related deaths and suicides on the rise in Australia,” said Nine. “Alcohol-induced deaths in Australia at their highest in 10 years,” fretted Guardian Australia. Even The Australian, which surely should know better, offered “almost 1600 people died in Australia last year as a result of alcohol consumption — the highest figure in a decade — as fears grow that the pandemic has accelerated a trend of risky drinking amid lax regulation and aggressive booze marketing”.

The source was the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data on causes of death for 2021. And you can’t totally blame journalists: the ABS itself made much of the role of alcohol, issuing a media release headlined “Low death rate, almost no flu but more alcohol-induced deaths in 2021”.

And alcohol-related deaths did indeed go up: “mental and behavioural disorders due to use of alcohol” increased from a standardised death rate of 0.9 to 1.1 per 100,000 population; alcoholic liver disease standardised death rate rose from 3.3 to 3.5; accidental poisoning by alcohol actually fell, but that’s somewhat rarer — the death rate only fell from 0.5 to 0.4.

So did the pandemic accelerate a “trend to risky drinking” as The Australian claimed? Well, if it did, surely deaths would have spiked in 2020, too, which they didn’t — figures between 2019 and 2020 are stable. And anyway — an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare survey showed more people reporting lowering their alcohol consumption during the pandemic than increasing it. That’s backed up by other peer-reviewed studies. Another peer-reviewed study focused on young people found marked reductions in consumption, too.

In short, the “pandemic made everyone drink more” is a beat-up by the media and public health bodies funded by taxpayers to demonise alcohol.

But let’s assume alcohol-related deaths are surging, for argument’s sake. 1600 people sounds like a lot! Does that mean alcohol is a major source of death? Let’s check the rest of the data: heart disease killed 17,000; dementia nearly 16,000; strokes nearly 10,000; lung and throat cancer nearly 9000. Where does alcohol fit? Go through all the causes of death and the most frequent alcohol-related killer, alcoholic liver disease, doesn’t make it into the top 70 causes of death. It’s well below transport accidents, falls (over 6000 deaths), unknown causes of death and brain tumours.

For that matter, there was a big rise in falls in 2021 — about 600 more people than in 2020, placing it just out of the top 10 causes of death — which no one has connected to the pandemic or lockdowns. The media doesn’t really talk about falls, but they cause more than 6000 deaths a year among seniors, and they can be minimised with better interior and exterior design and personal equipment. Yet there’s no anti-fall taxpayer-funded lobby group with a vested interest in constantly talking about falls, so they don’t get much attention.

There was a sharp rise in female genital cancers — indeed, an overall rise in cancer deaths, along with marked rises in the death rates of almost all of the top 10 causes of death of Australians (bearing in mind the figures are heavily skewed by non-Indigenous deaths — Indigenous peoples have much higher death rates and in some cases quite different top causes). In some cases the increases merely take us back to 2019 levels; in others, such as falls, that’s not the case.

Still, it makes for an easy headline to single out the 73rd most common cause of death if people have already been misled into thinking Australians spent the pandemic boozing it up.