Brownstone Institute
Sweden Did Exceptionally Well During the COVID-19 Pandemic
From the Brownstone Institute
No wonder the news media are totally silent about the data that show that Sweden’s open society policy was what the rest of the world should have done, too. Numerous studies have shown Sweden’s excess death rate to be among the lowest in Europe during the pandemic and in several analyses, Sweden was at the bottom.
This is remarkable considering that Sweden has admitted that it did too little to protect people living in nursing homes.
Unlike the rest of the world, Sweden largely avoided implementing mandatory lockdowns, instead relying on voluntary curbs on social gatherings, and keeping most schools, restaurants, bars and businesses open. Face masks were not mandated and it was very rare to see any Swede dressed as a bank robber.
The Swedish Public Health Agency “gave more advice than threatened punishment” while the rest of the world installed fear in people. “We forbade families to visit their grandmother in the nursing home, we denied men attendance at their children’s births, we limited the number who were allowed to attend church at funerals. Maybe people are willing to accept very strong restrictions if the fear is great enough.”
If we turn to other issues than mortality, it is clear that the harms done by the draconian lockdowns in the rest of the world have been immense in all sorts of ways.
For any intervention in healthcare, we require proof that the benefits exceed the harms. This principle was one of the first and most important victims of the pandemic. Politicians all over the world panicked and lost their heads, and the randomised trials we so badly needed to guide us were never carried out.
We should abbreviate the great pandemic to the great panic.
In my book, “The Chinese virus: Killed millions and scientific freedom,” from March 2022, I have a section about lockdowns.
Lockdown, a questionable intervention
The reborn intolerance toward alternative ideas has been particularly acrimonious in the debate about lockdowns.
There are two main ways to respond to viral pandemics, described in two publications that both came out in October 2020.
The Great Barrington Declaration is only 514 words, with no references. It emphasizes the devastating effects of lockdowns on short- and long-term public health, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed. Arguing that for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than influenza, it suggests that those at minimal risk of death should live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection and to establish herd immunity in the society.
It recommends focused protection of the vulnerable. Nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing for COVID-19 of other staff and all visitors. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home and should meet family members outside when possible.
Staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone. Schools, universities, sports facilities, restaurants, cultural activities, and other businesses should be open. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.
I have not found anything in the Declaration to be factually wrong.
The other publication is the John Snow Memorandum, which came out two weeks later. Its 945 words are seriously manipulative. There are factual inaccuracies, and several of its 8 references are to highly unreliable science. The authors claim that SARS-CoV-2 has high infectivity, and that the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is several times higher than that of seasonal influenza.
This is not correct (see Chapter 5), and the two references the authors use are to studies using modelling, which are highly bias-prone.
They also claim that transmission of the virus can be mitigated through the use of face masks, with no reference, even though this was, and still is, a highly doubtful claim.
“The proportion of vulnerable people constitute as much as 30% of the population in some regions.” This was cherry-picking from yet another modelling study whose authors defined increased risk of severe disease as one of the conditions listed in some guidelines. With such a broad definition, it is easy to scare people. However, they did not tell their readers that the modelling study also estimated that only 4% of the global population would require hospital admission if infected,36 which is similar to influenza.
The two declarations did not elicit enlightened debates, but strongly emotional exchanges of views on social media devoid of facts. The vitriolic attacks were almost exclusively directed against those supporting the Great Barrington Declaration, and many people, including its authors, experienced censorship from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The Great Barrington Declaration has three authors; the John Snow Memorandum has 31. The former was published on a website, which is kept alive, the latter in Lancet, which gives its many authors prestige.
In 2021, over 900,000 people had signed the Great Barrington Declaration, including me, as I have always found that the drastic lockdowns we have had, with all its devastating consequences for our societies, were neither scientifically nor ethically justified. I did Google searches to get an idea how much attention the two declarations have had. For the Great Barrington Declaration, there were 147,000 results; for the John Snow Memorandum only 5,500.
The Great Barrington Declaration has not had much political impact. It is much easier for politicians to be restrictive than keeping the societies open. Once a country has taken drastic measures, such as lockdowns and border closings, other countries are accused of being irresponsible if they don’t do the same – even though their effect is unproven. Politicians will not get in trouble for measures that are too draconian, only if it can be argued that they did too little.
In March 2021, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, drew attention to some of the consequences of the current climate of intolerance. In many cases, eminent scientific voices have been effectively silenced, often with gutter tactics. People who oppose lockdowns have been accused of having blood on their hands and their university positions threatened.
Many have chosen to stay quiet rather than face the mob, for example Jonas Ludvigsson, after he had published a ground-breaking Swedish study making it clear that it is safe to keep schools open during the pandemic, for children and teachers alike. This was taboo.
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya argued that with so many COVID-19 deaths, most of which have been in old people, it should be obvious that lockdown strategies have failed to protect the old.
The attacks on the Great Barrington Declaration appear to have been orchestrated from the top. On 8 October 2020, Francis Collins, the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), sent a denigrating email to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and advisor for several US Presidents, where he wrote:
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?”
Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins, reported that a letter he wrote about the potential harms of population-wide lockdowns in April 2020 was rejected by more than 10 scientific journals and 6 newspapers, sometimes with the pretence that there was nothing useful in it. It was the first time in his career that he could not get a piece placed anywhere.
In September 2021, BMJ allowed Gavin Yamey and David Gorski to publish an attack on the Great Barrington Declaration called, Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt. A commentator hit the nail when he wrote:
“This is a shoddy smear that is not for publication. The authors have not shown where their targets are scientifically incorrect, they just attack them for receiving funding from sources they dislike or having their videos and comments removed by social media corporations as if that was some indication of guilt.”
Kulldorff has explained what is wrong with the article. They claimed the Declaration provides support to the anti-vaccine movement and that its authors are peddling a “well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests.” But nobody paid the authors any money for their work or for advocating focused protection, and they would not have undertaken it for a professional gain, as it is far easier to stay silent than put your head above the parapet.
Gorski is behaving like a terrorist on social media, and he is perhaps a troll. Without having any idea what I had decided to talk about, or what my motives and background were, he tweeted about me in 2019 that I had “gone full on antivax.” My talk was about why I am against mandatory vaccination for an organisation called Physicians for Informed Consent. Who could be against informed consent? But when I found out who the other speakers were, I cancelled my talk.
In January 2022, Cochrane published a so-called rapid review of the safety of reopening schools or keeping them open. The 38 included studies comprised 33 modelling studies, three observational studies, one quasi‐experimental and one experimental study with modelling components. Clearly, nothing reliable can come out of this, which the authors admitted: “There were very little data on the actual implementation of interventions.”
Using modelling, you can get any result you want, depending on the assumptions you put into the model. But the authors’ conclusion was plain nonsense: “Our review suggests that a broad range of measures implemented in the school setting can have positive impacts on the transmission of SARS‐CoV‐2, and on healthcare utilisation outcomes related to COVID‐19.”
They should have said that since there were no randomised trials, we don’t know if school closures do more good than harm. What they did is what Tom Jefferson has called “garbage in and garbage out … with a nice little Cochrane logo on it.”
About the failing scientific integrity of Cochrane reviews, the funder of the UK Cochrane groups noted in April 2021 that, “This is a point raised by people in the Collaboration to ensure that garbage does not go into the reviews; otherwise, your reviews will be garbage.”
Even though there was nothing to conclude from it, the authors filled 174 pages – about the length of the book you are currently reading – about the garbage they included in their review, which was funded by the Ministry of Education and Research in Germany.
A 2020 rapid systematic review in a medical journal found that school closures did not contribute to the control of the SARS epidemic in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Lockdowns could even make matters worse. If children are sent home to be looked after by their grandparents because their parents are at work, it could bode disaster for the grandparents. Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, the median age of those who died was 83.
The whole world missed a fantastic opportunity to find out what the truth was by randomising some schools to be closed while keeping others open, but such trials were never done. Atle Fretheim, research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, tried to do a trial but failed. In March 2020, Norwegian government officials were unwilling to keep schools open. Two months later, as the virus waned, they refused to keep schools closed. Norwegian TV shot the messenger: “Crazy researcher wants to experiment with children.” What was crazy was not to do the study. Craziness was also the norm in USA. In many large American cities, bars were open while schools were closed.
When people argue for or against lockdowns and how long they should last and for whom, they are on uncertain ground. Sweden tried to go on with life as usual, without major lockdowns. Furthermore, Sweden has not mandated the use of face masks and very few people have used them.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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