It is chapter and verse nowadays among COVID-19 policy dissidents – or at least those who get amplified the most on X – that ‘Sweden won’: namely, by bucking the trend and refusing to lock down, taking the initial hit of higher excess mortality at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic but ultimately being rewarded by lower excess mortality over the official course of the pandemic as a whole. Graphs like the below, showing Sweden with the lowest excess mortality in all of Europe during the pandemic period, are widely-cited as evidence of this victory of Sweden’s ‘no lockdown’ approach.
But sceptics of the Covid measures have been spectacularly wrong-footed in citing such data, since if Sweden did indeed resist lockdown, it by no means resisted mass vaccination. As the below Statista graph illustrates, Sweden in fact had one of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in Europe.
If the vaccination ranking is not quite a mirror image of the mortality ranking, it is nonetheless striking that while high-vax Sweden has the lowest excess mortality in the mortality graph, Bulgaria, which has the lowest vaccination rate, has the highest excess mortality. Indeed, the entire top of the mortality table, i.e. the countries with the highest mortality, consists of relatively low-vax Eastern European countries. Hence, if the data in the first graph is to be believed, it would appear to demonstrate less that ‘Sweden won’ – since virtually all the other countries locked down anyway – and more that COVID-19 vaccination ‘won’.
It is perhaps worth noting here that the first graph comes precisely from Statistics Sweden – not exactly a neutral source in this connection – and was commissioned by the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet for the purpose of an interview with Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s COVID-19 response.
But, in any event, a group of dissident Swedish doctors known as the Doctors’ Appeal or Läkaruppropet has been challenging the new orthodoxy on Sweden’s alleged Covid-response ‘win’, calling attention to other data which look like anything but ‘winning’. For if Swedish mortality has remained relatively stable, Swedish ‘natality’ has in fact plummeted.
As can be seen in the below graph from the Läkaruppropet group, Swedish birth rates have been below the prior 10-year trend for no less than 19 months now and the Swedish birth shortfall has got progressively worse, reaching a low of minus-15.5% in April of this year. The Läkaruppropet doctors point out, moreover, that the decline in Swedish birth rates began after COVID-19 vaccinations were rolled out to women of childbearing age.
But there is an obvious paradox here: if toxicities of COVID-19 vaccines had such a major impact on natality, why did they not also have a major impact on mortality?
Well, the Läkaruppropet doctors suggest that they may well have. They note that Sweden’s 2022 excess death was the second highest in the last 20 years and suggest that it would in fact have been the highest were it not for the iatrogenic harms caused by the treatments received by vulnerable Swedes who contracted COVID-19 in 2020.
The famous ‘Sweden won’ graph reproduced above uses a three-year (2017-2019) pre-pandemic average as baseline for calculating excess mortality. (For the details of the methodology, see Bjorn Lomborg’s post here.) Using that same baseline and the official Swedish statistics here, we can calculate that Sweden had just over 4% excess mortality in 2022, up from just over 1% in 2021.
Perhaps this is a relative victory compared to some other countries. But for the third year of the pandemic – by which time Sweden should surely have been enjoying the benefits of herd immunity to COVID-19 – it is hard to see how this can be regarded as a victory in absolute terms.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
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If you survived the AZ shot – and many didn’t – you are in the clear.
The mRNA Phazer stab is more pernicious.
Taking a drug that instructs your bodies cells to make a toxin so the immune system can then kill those cells doesn’t sound like a great idea.
So they didn’t sell it quite like that…
It would be interesting to see Birth Rates relative to high and low mRNA countries.
I believe Israeli data very good
Looks like a good summary of the mechanics of it. It looks like a flawed design, given the emerging evidence. Might be worth examine the Chinese stats, if available, given the different structure of the Sinopharm products.
Indeed. Same goes for the J&J, which the USA had instead of the AZ and uses the same technology, but in a single dose. And later the Novavax as well, which is a protein subunit vaccine. But Pfizer and Moderna? Those turned out to be the very worst.
I think most of us understand that Sweden appears to have ‘won’, with it’s decision to ignore worldwide hysteria and not have a ‘lockdown ‘. At that time, there was a negligible difference in their excess deaths, and far less disruption to their society.
However, sadly, Sweden followed the herd unquestioningly with the rollout of the so called vaccines, with a similar consequence as other countries for excess deaths, a year later.
This article seems to be pointlessly conflating what, for me, seem to be two distinct events.
Beautifully put.
Yes…they won on the “lockdown” argument..in particular in keeping young children in school throughout….
….but no country that put the ‘loopy juice’ into the arms of its population can claim to be, or is a winner..
Indeed, this article is conflating two different things entirely.
Robert Kogan desperately clinging to the lock downs did something mantra and hysteria was justified. He’s from the Chris Snowden school of arrant nonsense. Their rational is totally upside down, Sweden has very clearly won if it isn’t a complete outlier statistically wrt to mortality, as it is the control vs lockdown. The fact Sweden is on the better end of the mortality spectrum in western Europe is the clearest possible evidence that lock downs were at best ineffective, but also highly suggestive lock downs were actually damaging wrt to mortality. Rarely does someone out themselves as demented and irrational the way Robert Kogan is doing here, it’s like listening to a flat earther. His conflation of vaccination, a totally separate thing, with lock down is also utterly absurd, all that data shows is Sweden ran an average vaxx program Vs western European. peers.
Indeed, Christopher Snowdon was VERY out of character when he supported the UK’s third lockdown and criticized Sweden’s approach.
Yes the libertarian who supports Chinese Marxism when it suits. Just a vicar of bray in old money.
Indeed, he is a glibertarian.
This article reeks of concern trolling.
Why would anyone base the concept of ‘excess’ deaths on a baseline of 2017-2019?
2019 was a particularly low mortality year in Sweden (as it was in the UK). It clearly bucks the trend of the preceding decade.
(Updated to add that if we extrapolate the 2017-2019 trend line Sweden gets zero deaths in 2050… Is that what’s meant by net-zero?)
Victory is what sense? I don’t think the use of the words ‘won’ and ‘victory’ here make any sense at all. No one won. We all – to greater or lesser degrees – lost. We lost to the imposition of an entirely new phenomenon: global health and its diktats. Sweden may have decided against the more draconian nonsensical manifestations of that but it will not have strayed far from the herd, indeed it jabbed away happily.
The only way Sweden would have bucked the trend is if it declared herd immunity through natural infection and told Pfizer to piss off. But the WHO would have been very grumpy with that outcome.
So true. Once they accepted the jabs, they achieved a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Maybe Nordic Swedes are choosing to have less babies because they don’t like the look of the future? Sweden’s rapidly exploding Muslim population won’t have such reservations and no doubt has a much higher birth rate.
There was no pandemic.
There was hysteria and abuse of power for profit. I suppose a pandemic of greed.
Greed, lies, stupidity. No public health emergency save for the grave danger to public health posed by the “public health” industry.
Yep, exactly like the climate emergency.
Eastern Europe has very different GDPs and health systems.
Birth rates have dropped throughout the highly vaxxed Western states, not just in Sweden.
Sweden already has a lower gov. debt/GDP ratio than before the plandemic, aka paid back its extra spending and debt and more.
Sweden’s youth, its citizens rights and its state and social contract are still intact, in contrast to all other countries’.
In short: Yes. Sweden won. Big.
BINGO. And Bulgaria’s smoking, obesity, and cardiovascular disease rates were off the charts prior to Covid, so that is probably why they fared so badly.
“Swedish birth rates have been below the prior 10-year average for no less than 19 months now and the Swedish birth shortfall has got progressively worse, reaching a low of minus-15.5% in April of this year.”
One cannot comment without comparative stats form other countries.
‘Winning’ was about citizens rights, children’s education, protection of the vulnerable, common sense, good leadership, good government.
Sweden certainly ‘won’ to one degree or another regarding most of those.
Britain, on the other hand (and disgracefully) ‘lost’ on the lot.
Bunter, the well named Hancock, the Gumby Brothers and the whole statist flying feck show (seemingly including the apparently hopelessly misguided inquiry), take a bow while the rest of us reach for the rotten tomatoes….
Sweden has puzzled me for a while.
No doubt the stress of the lockdowns (in countries other than Sweden) will have contributed to the excess deaths from cardiovascular disease we are seeing now. Stressful events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, have been shown to lead to an increase in atherosclerosis and heart disease. Lockdowns and the whole hysteria of the 2020-2022 timeframe will have done the same.
But then there is also the vaccine. One would have expected to have seen this in Swedish death figures. They are jabbed, it’s largely mRNA, and it appears to be having a deleterious impact on birth rates.
Why isn’t it? or at least why not as much as we see in other countries?
A few theories. Not necessarily mutually exclusive.
First, the mRNA jab deaths are batch dependent – probably contingent on how much DNA plasmid is in there. Maybe Sweden got lucky and wasn’t sent any of the deadly batches?
Second, there IS excess death in 2022. What’s it looking like in 2023? The cancer deaths only started to tick up at the end of 2022 in a meaningful way. It would be interesting to see how cancer death trends for Sweden look for 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Third, potentially more herd immunity was built up in Sweden ahead of the jabbing as society was more open. If the combination of vaccination followed by infection is the most deadly sequence of events, the Swedes may have avoided this largely, through strengthening innate immunity by getting natural infection first. This would also fit with the observation that excess deaths in the UK tend to come in waves, much like covid. Maybe it is covid on top of vaccination that kills some people – either because it is worse (ADE), their immune systems are screwed, or it’s spike damage compounding spike damage on heart etc. Do we know how much covid there is in Sweden these days? that might help answer this Q.
Bulgaria is a total red herring. Their covid wave was later (2021) in Eastern Europe. You need to include 2023 to have a comparable ‘pandemic period’ for the CEE countries.
So true. Bulgaria’s smoking, obesity, and cardiovascular disease rates were off the charts prior to Covid as well.
I’m not sure the article adds much. There is such a mix of stats from sources which have bias that I would rather see analysis by Joel Smalley.
Indeed, this article is rubbish.
Sweden won, hands down. But the jabs (which they uncritically accepted, instead of early treatment and prophylaxis like HCQ, IVM, and vitamins) unfortunately turned it into a Pyrrhic victory.
So when was this ‘pandemic’, and how long did it last? And did it (or they) occur at different times in each country? And was it even the same throughout one country? For I have never seen anything that matches a Gompertz curve.
Take England and Wales where the ‘pandemic’ lasted from the last week in March to the first week in June. And the average age of ‘covid’ deaths were two years above all-cause deaths.
Now it seems to me that some, shall we say, ‘interventions’ have confounded the data such that talk of actual, natural pandemics is utterly meaningless. And ‘interventions’ in different countries are not necessarily in sync.
Just for the record, in England and Wales over the last full year, excess deaths are now about the same as three years ago. That year encompassed the so-called ‘pandemic’.
The sense of a world disappeared. Sweden is an interesting example given the closeness of the Scandinavian countries and the difference in policy. I love a bit of spice on the corner but you can’t just declare yourself a ‘humanitarian superpower’ and then just let all and sundry in. Worse than all and sundry though because eastern countries use the situation to export the worst of their citizens. You need to be wise to this.How stupid do you have to be to not understand that in a competietive world such things are likely to happen? , Thankfully my acquaintance with the younger generation suggests that there is a movement towards a restoration and resolution.
You need to have a sharp picture in the newborns face that of a teacher oe heirophant. The sense that life is a journey of exploration and there are guides. That is all you need. If you show the children this spirit then they will do things beyond our imagining.
Lowest excess mortality during Covid but high since the “clot-shots”.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Something not accounted for in the analysis is the difference between various “vaxxine” lots, which has been extensively analysed and found to be correct.
So in theory, you could have high vaxxine takeup, but low mortality / morbidity – or exactly the opposite.
Either way, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” as they say.
Just don’t involve yourself in any way whatever with this depopulation agenda.
Sasha Latypova has convincingly shown that this is what it both was, and still is.
Nothing whatsoever has ever been proved with regard to the supposed efficacy ( and safety ) of any of these kill shots – whether they be platformed on mRNA or as was always the case previously, antibodies.
And let us remind ourselves of the polio vaccine hoax, which was predicated on a virus and a vaccine, but which turned out to be triggered not by a virus, but by arsenical pesticides sprayed onto fruit orchards.