Over at the Culture War Encyclopedia, we now have an in-depth entry regarding Sweden’s handling of the scamdemic. Below is the summary. See Covid in Sweden for the whole thing.
SUMMARY
Based on what we’ll see below…
Sweden weathered covid-19 relatively successfully without violating people’s rights or dignity on a mass scale. Things were not perfect in Sweden but they fared better than most. Almost entirely, the government refrained from mandating masks or even recommending them.1 They did not lock down or force people to social distance almost without exception.2 According to a paper published August 23, 2023 by the CATO Institute,
Sweden’s economy got through the pandemic better than comparable countries, and elementary school students have not suffered learning losses. These benefits do not seem to have come at the expense of human health. Remarkably, total excess deaths were smaller in Sweden than in any other European country during the three pandemic years (2020–2022), and the rate was less than half of America’s. In the absence of strict government control, Swedes adapted their behavior voluntarily.
This hands-off approach by the Swedish government was in line with the way of the Swedish people3 and was supported by a majority of Swedes but was presented in the corporate media as “highly controversial” and “a dangerous gamble with human lives.”4 The CATO Institute reported,
The rest of the world wanted to know why Sweden chose to remain open. Swedes thought that the more pertinent question was: Why did other countries close down?…What set Sweden apart was not some strange, unprecedented experiment, but the fact that Swedes did not suddenly and drastically change course…What set Sweden apart was that it stuck to that plan, and from a Swedish perspective, it looked like it was the rest of the world that was engaging in a risky, unprecedented experiment.
All throughout, the corporate media almost often failed to mention that there are differences between the drugs administered in Sweden and those administered elsewhere. Not all of these drugs were the same.
As one might predict, the disease burned hotter in Sweden at first but in the long run, Sweden did better than most. Their hospitals were not overrun. They had too many deaths as they acknowledged (because any amount is too many) but they navigated with relative success.
To be fair, it seems they did better than almost sources reported because of the different ways different nations define what counts as a death from Covid-19. In Sweden, those who died with Covid-19 were recorded as having died from Covid-19. In neighboring Norway they counted much more narrowly.5 It is not fair to compare Sweden’s death count with other nations under these conditions, but the media compared them anyway.
Also, as one might predict, some, including mainstream media, judged prematurely.6Trump did too,
It may not have helped that Anders Tegnell, the official in charge of Sweden’s response to disease outbreaks, said that their Infection Fatality Rate was “not radically different to what we see with the yearly flu”.7 Meanwhile, people were banned from social media for saying the same thing.
It seems some people did not want other people to know this. As a result, many people didn’t know and many still don’t know. Also, many people do not want to know. We’ll see research that suggests that people in France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, UK and USA vastly overestimated the amount of people in their nation who officially died of Covid-19.
Eventually it became apparent that Sweden’s approach worked, but only to a few. To quote a report from UnHerd on April 12, 2022,8
From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing.
Contrast the approach of Fauci in the USA who said, “that independent spirit, I can understand that, but now is the time to do what you’re told”9 with that of Anders Tegnell who said “I think a number of countries should have thought twice before taking the very drastic measure of a lockdown…that’s what’s experimental, not the Swedish model”10
There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”
Regarding exceptions to this, as reported by Johan Norberg for the CATO InstituteSweden during the Pandemic (Aug 29, 2023) that,
The most restrictive was that public gathering and events were limited to no more than 50 participants in March 2020. This included theater, cinema, concerts, lectures, religious meetings, demonstrations, sporting events, and amusement parks, but not workplaces, shopping centers, and private gatherings. In November 2020 this limit was reduced to eight people, then gradually lifted starting in May 2021 until it was fully removed in September 2021.
In April 2020 the government banned private visits to elderly care homes. Bars and restaurants were ordered to offer table service only and the space between tables had to be increased. In November 2020, alcohol sales after 10 p.m. were banned, and by the end of the year, the deadline was advanced to 8 p.m. This rule was terminated in June 2021.
The Public Health Agency of Sweden recommended that secondary schools and universities switch to distance education between March and June 2020, and again in December 2020 until early January 2021, but preschools and elementary schools stayed open throughout that time.
As a society, we are more into nudging: continuously reminding people to use measures, improving measures where we see day by day the that they need to be adjusted. We do not need to close down everything completely because it would be counterproductive.
There are other examples regarding this throughout the main body.
the number of COVID-19 deaths is not as simple a statistic as it seems. Some countries did not count deaths outside hospitals. When patients died at home or in nursing homes they were not automatically included in the data sets. In Sweden, by contrast, authorities automatically checked the lists of people who were infected against the population register, so everyone who died and had tested positive for the virus was counted as a COVID-19 death, even if they died from a heart attack or a fall. So in effect, Sweden reported many who died with COVID-19, not of COVID-19.
Even in a country as similar to Sweden as Norway, deaths were counted as a COVID-19 death only if the attending physician concluded that COVID-19 was the cause of death and called the country’s public health agency to report it. “It is possible that Norway could have a higher number of registered deaths if we counted as Sweden,” said a doctor at Norway’s public health agency in April 2020.
This is why so many scholars and decisionmakers insisted that it was necessary to wait for a broader perspective and look at excess deaths, that is, the number of deaths over a period compared to a previous period or an expected value. Now we have those numbers. When you look at excess deaths during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, you get a very different picture. According to this measure, Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland (see Figure 2).30
These numbers, though surprising, are not controversial. These are the numbers that each country reports for themselves. The crude excess death rate, however, is a blunt measure. It does not take into consideration the population structure, such as age and health. It treats deaths from COVID-19 just as it does deaths from traffic accidents and suicides. Yet it is a way of getting around the problem that countries count COVID-19 deaths differently, and it is an important corrective to the assumption that Sweden willingly sacrificed lives on a massive scale.
