Back in April 2020, Stuff reported on how Sweden had fared during that spring’s coronavirus wave despite bucking the international trend to lock down.
Professor Johan Giesecke, who first recruited Tegnell during his own time as state epidemiologist, used a rare interview last week to argue that the Swedish people would respond better to more sensible measures. He blasted the sort of lockdowns imposed in Britain and Australia and warned a second wave would be inevitable once the measures are eased.
“The Swedish Government decided early in January that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence based. And when you start looking around at the measures being taken by different countries, you find very few of them have a shred of evidence-base,” he said.
Giesecke, who has served as the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Control and has been advising the Swedish Government during the pandemic, told the UnHerd website there was “almost no science” behind border closures and school closures and social distancing and said he looked forward to reviewing the course of the disease in a year’s time.
“I think that the difference between countries will be quite small in the end,” he said. “I don’t think you can stop it. It’s spreading. It will roll over Europe no matter what you do.”
Giesecke was almost correct. But, the difference between the countries in the end was not quite small. Sweden did much, much better – ten times better than Chile, in fact, notorious for having the strictest lockdowns ‘despite’ also having one of the most ‘successful’ vaccination campaigns.
As of reporting date June 19th 2022, of all the countries analysed by the OECD, Sweden has the lowest overall cumulative excess deaths tally.
The somewhat less meaningful Covid death tally (per million population) does not have the same relative magnitude since different countries use different methods for recording what is and what isn’t a Covid death, on top of the fact, of course, that it’s a Pyrrhic victory to mitigate Covid deaths at the expense of higher excess non-Covid deaths. Take a look at Canada and Israel as prime examples of this – remarkably low Covid deaths relative to the rest of the world but very much in the worst half of the dataset in terms of overall excess mortality.
So, Sweden even beat neighbour Norway in the end. And, as you can see in the charts below, Norway is still heading in the wrong direction. So too are early successes, Australia and New Zealand. Their cumulative excess death tally has less Covid in it than other countries but they are getting their Covid add-ons now.
Here are the charts, plotting cumulative excess deaths vs Covid deaths. (Find the full set here.)
And here are the charts plotting excess deaths against vaccinations. Note how excess deaths taper as vaccinations do. Just a coincidence or Bradford Hill criteria #10? (Full set here.)
My analysis of each country leads me to three main conclusions.
First, Covid exists and is deadly for some. This is evident given the very strong and consistent correlations between weekly excess deaths and weekly reported Covid deaths. I think it is also important to accept this fact given that there is very little resistance now to the assertion that Covid was manufactured in a biolab. Those responsible for making it are responsible for the millions of deaths it has caused.
Secondly, experimental attempts at mitigating the spread of the virus through various ‘social distancing’ measures, including school and business closures, imprisoning healthy people in their homes, forced wearing of masks, etc. show very little evidence of benefit. Any specious evidence from prison islands (Australia and New Zealand) is ultimately proven futile as predicted by the world’s two best epidemiologists (Giesecke and Tegnell). The harms of these interventions are also apparent in the ultimate excess death numbers. Those responsible for implementing them should be held accountable for the deaths they have caused.
Thirdly, the only thing that could have made Covid worse was to put the same people responsible for making it in charge of making the antidote. It’s a bit like putting the arsonists in charge of fire policy after they have burnt down the city. But that’s what happened with Covid. It is abundantly clear that there is no reduction in Covid deaths as a result of the mass administration of the experimental ‘vaccine’. Moreover, as we should logically expect deficits in periods after excess mortality such as occurred in the nine months prior to the medical experiment, and greater protection from herd immunity, and the natural selection of less virulent variants, it is difficult to argue against the allegation that the experiment has somehow contributed to the perpetuation of Covid rather than its demise. This is further supported by the fact that Covid and excess deaths both taper off in line with society’s final realisation that they should take no further part in the experiment.
Perhaps next time, we should all be a bit more like Sweden? You know, like our lives depended on it? Not the bit about hurried medical experimentation though, we can leave that bit out.
Just the bit about letting people decide for themselves what actions they should take when faced with life.
It might just be me but I don’t think stupid politicians, greedy pharmaceutical companies and academics whose careers depend on pharma funding are the best people for the job.
This post originally appeared on Joel Smalley’s Substack page. Subscribe here.
Update: The methodology used in this post to calculate ‘cumulative excess mortality’ takes the weekly excess percentage, divides by 52 and then plots the sum of these percentages over the specified period. The effect is to give at the end of a year an average weekly percentage excess for the year. For an analysis that uses a conventional understanding of cumulative excess mortality (using the total deaths divided by the total expected deaths up to the date) see Joel’s follow up post.
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Another “conspiracy theory” comes true!
Is that about 22-0 now? Since AGW, Brexit, Trump and now COVID.
When I pointed out the success of Sweden’s approach more than a year ago to my MP he loftily declared, as if he was citing incontrovertible fact that Sweden had not done well as evidenced by the apologies offered by their King and Prime Minister.
I knew then that he, like the rest, was an utter ****. I wasn’t totally sure up to that point.
The fact he was a MP should have been your first clue
It was always likely that lockdowns killed more people than they “saved”.
Sweden was misrepresented, lied about, vilified, and we were vilified for using them as an example.
However it should be remembered that Sweden did have some restrictions, vaxxed lots of people, and for a long time barred entry to the unvaxxed. Way better than here, but far from perfect.
Finally, while it’s nice that Sweden “did well”, covid was obviously never a societal threat so any measures beyond giving people accurate information and looking into effective treatments (HCQ, ivermectin, whatever) there was no need to do anything out of the ordinary or treat it differently to a bad flu season. We knew that from the start.
So true. Lockdowns inherently kill more people than they save. And it was self-evident and thus entirely foreseeable from the get-go by anyone with a modicum of intellectual honesty and more than two brain cells to rub together.
How much better again would it have been if safe and effective early treatments had not been not outlawed at the behest of Big Pharma? There must be a reckoning.
“not been outlawed”!
Indeed, very true.
Has the UK really had 24.5% excess deaths over 2020-2022? That is more than twice what I have from ONS data.
I have about 10.5% from January 2020 to today’s figures. That is excess above the average 2010-2019, corrected for population.
Have I got something wrong here?
is it because you’re using a 10 year (2010-2019) previous average as comparison?
This is its most simple form, uncorrected for population. Deaths registered in England and Wales Sheet 1a here gives
2021 586,334
2020 607,922
2019 530,841
2018 541,589
2017 533,253
2016 525,048
2015 529,655
2014 501,424
2013 506,790
2012 499,331
2011 484,367
2010 493,242
Ave 2010-2019 = 514,554
Ave 2015-2019 = 532,077
Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales Sheet 1 here gives
2022 471,064 (sum to week 43)
Total deaths 2020-2022 = 607,922 + 586,334 + 471,064 = 1,665,320
(2+43/52)*average 10 year = 1,454,605, excess = 14.5% approx
(2+43/52)*average 5 year = 1,454,605, excess = 10.7% approx
(These will be a few percent smaller when corrected for population and does not adjust for seasons. My chart does include this.)
Either way, it is nowhere near 24.5%
What have I done wtong?
Note: I think I see what Joel Smalley has done!
He has not taken the real % excess – i.e. above normal.
He has taken about 2.5 years excess deaths as a percentage over 1 year!
It’s accumulative excess deaths over the 2020 – 2022 period, not an annualised average.
Yes, as I later suggested.
I have been working with excess weekly deaths. These are currently 17.7% above the 2010-2019 average (population adjusted) when taken over the last three weeks. That’s for England and Wales. So 24.5% was a surprise until I sussed what it meant!
Amen to that! “Stockholm Syndrome” should really be renamed “Melbourne Syndrome”, because #SwedenGotItRight.
Additionally, Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and the Faeroe Islands didn’t do any worse than their stricter neighbors either in terms of all cause excess deaths. Ditto for the 12 states in the USA that eschewed lockdowns as well, compared to the rest of the country.
And it appears that the Governor of one of the sane states has done quite well in the current election (Ron De Santis). I wonder if that had anything to do with the election results?
Indeed. Ditto for Kristi Noem of South Dakota as well. A fortiori, in fact.
Well at least they got something right, but how is that multiculturalism working out for them? Or is it still against the law there to criticise the sex crime statistics?
I taught in schools for years. In the good old days the winter lurgy (whatever it was) would sweep through the school system and we’d hear that half the staff of school A were off and it was chaos as teachers tried to cope. A week later we’d hear that the lurgy had moved to school B and it was chaos there. This pattern continued through the local schools over a period of a few weeks and then everything settled down to whatever was considered normal. The point being that viruses moving through the population is what they do. People get ill or don’t depending on their own biology and susceptibilty. People are affected differently but for most it is a few days of ill health followed by a return to life. There is no need for lockdowns, masks, social distancing or whatever.
It is to be hoped that lessons will have been learned in the last 3 years but then again…
They didn’t bother with the lessons learned in the last 100 years, so clearly these buffoons will learn nothing from the last 3.
Sweden would have done even better if it had refused to roll-out the gene therapy jabs.
Indeed. Ditto if they had used HCQ and IVM as well (unfortunately it looks like they did not). But their food is fortified with Vitamin D at least, like the other Nordic countries and Canada, but unlike the USA, UK, and most of Europe.
Surely its obvious to anybody, but Americans, that Fauci was the supporter and promoter of the research originally in America, but later farmed out to the Wuhan lab in China. On that basis he has a big part of the responsibility for Covid existing, because it escaped from that lab, yet he continued in post imposing his restrictions not based on real science. Now he is being allowed to retire with probably a big payout and pension – he should be strung up, although as that doesn’t happen these days people should at least be aware of the number of deaths he has caused. Surely he should be forced to accept his responsibility and make a public appology.
And then be convicted and sent to jail.
“Those responsible for implementing them should be held accountable for the deaths they have caused”
While this is true, the economic and social effects of lockdowns will persist for generations. The people responsible for lockdowns should be held to account for this too
Can someone explain the sourcing on this? I can’t seem to spot any even on the full article.