Only Sweden had the right COVID-19 response

HOW WOULD the COVID-19 experience have turned out had there been no government-imposed states of emergency, no mask mandates, no orders to shelter in place, and no shutdowns of schools, restaurants, offices, and gyms?
The query isn't hypothetical. While the United States and virtually every advanced nation did turn to lockdowns and compulsory social distancing, Sweden charted a very different course. There, life continued more or less normally. Only public gatherings of more than 50 people were banned. Elementary schools, day-care facilities, shops, and parks stayed open. Health officials emphasized the importance of hand-washing and advised residents older than 70 to stay home. But masking was not mandatory; there were relatively few restrictions on personal mobility; and unlike elsewhere, public messaging by government leaders did not reflect frantic desperation.

We now know the result of Sweden's wager: By every important measure, Scandinavia's most populous country weathered the pandemic with better consequences than other nations. Its economy didn't collapse, its children suffered no learning loss, and it registered no increase in suicides. Most important, Sweden's excess death rate during the three pandemic years — the increase in mortality from 2020 through 2022 compared with the loss of life during the previous three years — was lower than in any other European nation.

The data are summarized in a new study for the Cato Institute by the historian and social researcher Johan Norberg. The policy paper provides convincing evidence that the approach adopted by the United States and other advanced nations — an approach that relied on top-down coercion and sharply curtailed personal freedom — was a mistake.

For a while, the prevailing view was that the mistake was Sweden's. The disease spread quickly through the Swedish population in the early months and by July 2020 Stockholm was reporting COVID-19 deaths at a level of 517 per million — several times the rate in nearby Norway, Denmark, and Finland. "Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale," reported The New York Times, which blamed the country's "grim result" on its "failure to impose social distancing." Former president Donald Trump agreed, declaring that "Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown."

But Swedish voters backed their government and gave its noncoercive policy time to work. The upshot, writes Norberg, is that "based on what we now know, [Sweden's] laissez-faire approach seems to have paid off."

It wasn't entirely laissez-faire. In addition to banning gatherings of more than 50 people, Sweden stopped visits to nursing homes, imposed earlier closing hours on bars and restaurants, and — as required by European Union rules — closed its borders to non-Europeans. But on the whole, Swedes were trusted by their political leaders to use their own judgment.

Measured against the yardstick of reported COVID-19 deaths, Sweden by 2023 was squarely in the middle of the pack: Its death rate was about 40 percent higher than that of the rest of Scandinavia but much lower than that in Southern Europe, Britain, and the United States. Then again, Sweden counted everyone who died and had tested positive for the virus as a COVID death, whereas in other countries, such as Norway, only when an attending physician listed COVID as the cause of a patient's death was it included in the statistics.

For that reason, Norberg spotlights "excess deaths," a category that includes all the additional lives lost to the pandemic, including those not necessarily encompassed by a given country's official COVID data. By that metric, Sweden appears to have outperformed every country in Europe. Its excess-death rate during the pandemic was just 4.4 percent higher than the previous norm. That's less than half of the European average of 11.1 percent and lower even than the 6.77 percent average of its Nordic neighbors.

Sweden's strategy paid off in other ways, too.

While Europe's overall economy shrank by 2.1 percent during the pandemic lockdowns, the Swedish economy expanded slightly. Students in many nations fell behind by as much as a year in one or more subjects, but Swedish children suffered no learning loss. Lockdowns forced tens of millions of kids worldwide to miss out on childhood vaccinations; in Sweden, the juvenile vaccination rate went up. And though a dreadful spike in domestic abuse and suicides was reported in many countries, no such phenomenon was observed in Sweden.

"It was not Sweden that engaged in a reckless, unprecedented pandemic experiment, but the rest of the world," Norberg concludes. It was a serious mistake to drastically limit citizens' liberty and shut down so much of society. The world's elites sneered at Sweden, but Sweden was right.

https://jeffjacoby.com/27193/only-sweden-had-the-right-covid-19-response

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Failed vaccine mandates

In Australia, the vaccine efficacy that preoccupies state premiers – who imposed the mandates – is getting re-elected. As Premier Andrews put it when he won the Victorian election in a ‘Dan-slide’ last November, ‘Vaccines work!’ In Queensland, Premier Palasczcuk is so keen to repeat the act that she’s hired Andrews’ adman.

But who will last longer? The mandates or Palasczcuk? On Friday 1 September, Health Minister Shannon Fentiman (mooted to be a front-runner to replace the Premier) announced two-week consultations on removing the mandates, two years after they were imposed in September 2021.

Queensland’s Chief Health Officer (CHO) has already said they should go but the power of the CHO which seemed almost unlimited at the height of Covid hysteria has diminished now that he is proposing something sensible.

A group called Doctors Against Mandates mounted a legal challenge to the mandates on 12 March 2022. Within a fortnight of receiving 13 affidavits from medical professionals and six reports from international experts, the CHO revoked the mandates for health workers in the private sector. Unfortunately, mandates which cover the public sector health are still in force.

One of the most damning indictments of vaccine efficacy was filed in relation to the doctors’ challenge to the mandate in the Supreme Court of Queensland early this year by the state’s Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerrard. It revealed that once 80 per cent of the population were vaccinated and the borders opened in December 2021, not only did Covid cases explode, peaking at 18,500 per day in January, but 80 per cent of the 176 Covid deaths were in people who had had one or more Covid vaccine jabs. Most were double-vaxxed but 13 were triple-vaxxed and one died after five shots. In other words, the vaccines were duds. They failed to stop the pandemic or prevent the vulnerable from dying. All the bullying of the unvaccinated, preventing grieving Australians from comforting their dying loved ones or attending their funerals, denying a pregnant woman in New South Wales permission to cross the border and get urgent medical treatment which meant she waited 16 hours to fly to Sydney, and lost one of her twins – it was all for nothing.

Did the Premier rush to apologise for the damage done by the ‘failed vaccines’, to quote Bill Gates who profited heavily from his investment in the Pfizer jab? Of course not. The information was only made public last month by Rebekah Barnett in her excellent substack Dystopian Downunder.

Far from apologising, Queensland Health is still threatening disciplinary action against ‘hundreds’ of workers who ‘did not comply with their employment contract’ by getting jabbed.

Infectious disease physician Paul Griffin supports ending the mandates but thinks the biggest risk is that ‘people will think the initial rule was wrong, which,’ according to him, ‘isn’t the case’.

That’s the nub of it. The government doesn’t want to admit that the vaccines are useless and the mandates were morally, scientifically and practically wrong.

The only reason it is ending the mandate is because it can’t replace the more than 2,100 healthcare workers who were stood down or forced to resign.

‘We have global workforce shortages, so I think it makes sense now to reconsider this mandate,’ Fentiman says.

‘If someone wants to now reapply for a job with Queensland Health who is not vaccinated for Covid, they’ll be treated the same as any other worker.’

Despite a massive increase in Australia’s international immigration intake and wage hikes in the health sector, acute shortages persist, not least because the repeatedly vaccinated healthcare workers repeatedly get Covid-19. This was observed in a study of more than 50,000 US healthcare workers in the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, which showed the more often you were jabbed, the more you caught Covid.

Interstate migration into Queensland, predominantly Victoria, and NSW, the states worst affected by lockdown lunacy, has increased demand for health services.

National excess mortality of over 13 per cent this year has increased pressure on hospitals.

The dramatic spike in ‘dying suddenly’ is recorded under ‘other cardiac conditions’ in Australia’s provisional mortality data. Deaths from January to May are 15.5 per cent higher than the baseline average and 1 per cent higher than the same period in 2022.

Deaths due to diabetes were 22 per cent above the baseline average in May 2023, and 1.4 per cent higher than in May 2022

Deaths due to dementia including Alzheimer’s were 18 per cent above the baseline average in May 2023, and 2.1 per cent above May 2022.

Each of these causes of death has been linked in studies to the spike protein in the virus and/or the vaccine. For example, a paper from Larson et al. at Linkoping University, Sweden published on 1 September presents evidence for the initiation or acceleration of Alzheimer’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease by the spike protein.

When the mandate for health workers ends in Queensland, flagged for 25 September, only NSW, Victoria and South Australia will be left. Will that be the end?

Who knows? In the US some colleges and hospitals are trying to bring back mask mandates.

Scott Gottlieb, former head of the US Food and Drug Administration and now on the board of Pfizer is talking up the next booster.

The latest variant has been named after Eris, the Greek goddess of ‘strife and discord’. What is the plan? A rerun of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter on the rampage in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election? Skeptics have their own name for the variant – BS.24.7.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/bs-24-7/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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