The golden apple of discord, the tiny little thing that ruined the peace and order ot the gods of Olympus. It was a ‘gift’ from Eris, the Goddess of discord.
We here at the Culture War Enclyclopedia have been putting together the COVID BOONDOGGLE PROJECT to archive and organize the truth and lies about the last scamdemic. It’s still in progress. Now we have the sequel. Get ready for . . .
SCAMDEMIC 2
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Dr. Fauci and others stated that the fatality rate of COVID-19 “may be considerably less than 1%” and that therefore it is like a strong case of the common seasonal flu and not nearly as serious as SARS or MERS with “fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively” which elicited a far less severe authoritarian response from governments and idiocy from the populace. See Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted in the New England Journal of Medicine (2020).
The April demonstration was a protest against Mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to charge people if they drove older, more polluting cars anywhere in the Greater London area.
The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies worldwide and killed at least 7 million people worldwide.
WHO said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t come to an end, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The U.N. health agency says that thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week.
“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to reassess the situation should COVID-19 “put our world in peril.”
Tedros said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID-19. He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the virus had shattered businesses and plunged millions into poverty.
“COVID has changed our world and it has changed us,” he said, warning that the risk of new variants still remained.
More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.
In the U.S., the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped many of their provisions against the pandemic last year.
When Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the virus’ potential to spread in countries with weak health systems he described as “ill-prepared.”
In fact, some of the countries that suffered the worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously judged to be the best-prepared for a pandemic, including the U.S. and Britain. According to WHO data, the number of deaths reported in Africa account for just 3% of the global total.
WHO made its decision to lower its highest level of alert on Friday, after convening an expert group on Thursday. The U.N. agency doesn’t “declare” pandemics, but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to every continent except Antarctica, long after many other scientists had said a pandemic was already underway.
WHO is the only agency mandated to coordinate the world’s response to acute health threats, but the organization faltered repeatedly as the coronavirus unfolded. In January 2020, WHO publicly applauded China for its supposed speedy and transparent response, even though recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed top officials were frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.
Numerous scientists also slammed WHO’s reluctance to acknowledge that COVID-19 was frequently spread in the air and by people without symptoms, criticizing the agency’s lack of strong guidance to prevent such exposure.
Tedros was a vociferous critic of rich countries who hoarded the limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, warning that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” by failing to share shots with poor countries.
Most recently, WHO has been struggling to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a challenging scientific endeavor that has also become politically fraught.
After a weeks-long visit to China, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 most likely jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility that it originated in a lab as “extremely unlikely.”
But the U.N. agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing and that it was premature to rule out that COVID-19 might have ties to a lab.
A panel commissioned by WHO to review its performance criticized China and other countries for not moving quicker to stop the virus and said the organization was constrained both by its limited finances and inability to compel countries to act.
Protesters radicalized by their opposition to Covid-19 lockdowns have a new target: anti-traffic measures.
LONDON - According to committed conspiracy theorist and climate change skeptic Linda Skinner, the Covid-19 pandemic was just the start of the global elite’s effort to oppress the world.
What’s the shadowy cabal’s next goal? Take away your car, the Londoner said.
While there is no evidence such a plan exists, Skinner is part of a growing group that evolved out of anti-vaccine protests and has energized a campaign against environmental measures across Britain and elsewhere.
Notice that they say that there is no evidence for a plan to take away cars in London. Notice below that they will mention such evidence.
Many of these fears are generalized into opposition to “15-minute cities,” an urban planning idea designed to reduce traffic and increase walking and cycling that has become an obsession of the post-pandemic protest movement.
“This is only the beginning,” said Skinner, 64, who works at a jewelers and believes Covid was developed and released by a shadowy and powerful group “as a trial to see how compliant people would be.”
The April demonstration was a protest against Mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to charge people if they drove older, more polluting cars anywhere in the Greater London area.
Drivers already have to pay £12.50 ($15.50) to drive high-polluting vehicles, typically older diesel cars, in central boroughs, and beginning in August this will apply to all of Greater London, a huge geographic area.
It isn’t only about cars.
So there you have it; some evidence, evidence that they earlier claimed does not exist. This propaganda piece concludes,
Nigel Farage, the far-right populist and former leader of the Brexit Party who unsuccessfully ran for Parliament seven times, said on Twitter last week: “Mark my words, this isn’t going to end with 20 mph zones and low traffic neighborhoods, no no, this is the beginning of climate lockdowns.”
Nigel Farage, a MAINSTREAM politician, they claim, is extremist. Again, they want you to believe that the center is ‘far-right’ so that they can label the far-left ‘moderate’. You can read the remainder here.
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has opened an investigation into the development and implementation of overreaching, federal COVID-19 vaccination mandates and policies at the Department of Defense (DOD), U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Department of Labor (DOL), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Chairman Wenstrup is requesting access to all documents, communications, and guidance utilized by these agencies to craft their coercive policies prior to forcing a novel vaccine — that did not stop the spread or transmission of the virus — on millions of Americans. At the Select Subcommittee’s hearing on vaccine mandates last week, expert witnesses highlighted the Biden Administration’s abuse of executive power and disregard for individual freedoms that resulted in employment termination, decreased military readiness, and increased distrust in public health authorities. The Select Subcommittee is seeking further information from DOD, OPM, DOL, and HHS regarding any political interference by the Biden White House and other outside organizations on federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Further on, they state
Health care workers, federal employees, military service members, and hard-working Americans were forced to choose between their employment and medical freedom. The Select Subcommittee is asking DOD, OPM, DOL, and HHS to provide any relevant data on requested exemptions and terminated employment resulting from the implementation of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Although all federal mandates have since been rescinded, overturned, or otherwise ended, the detrimental consequences of these policy decisions continue to affect thousands of Americans, and the federal government’s egregious interference in the sacred doctor-patient relationship will undoubtedly have long lasting ramifications. The Select Subcommittee is committed to conducting a through investigation of any wrongdoing by government officials and seeks to deliver answers about COVID-19 vaccine mandates to the American people.
Pfizer reported second-quarter adjusted earnings that topped Wall Street’s expectations, but posted revenue that came in under estimates due to a steep drop in Covid product sales.
The New York-based company’s CFO said it is prepared to launch a cost-cutting program if Covid revenues are “less than what we assumed.”
Pfizer is in a transition period as it pivots away from its blockbuster coronavirus vaccine and Covid antiviral drug Paxlovid while the world emerges from the pandemic.
Note that though it has been officially annonced long ago that the pandemic is not pandemic, this piece claims the world is still emerging from a covid pandemic in 2023. You should read the entire article here, but it amounts to the following; they decided they are no longer getting enough money from the last scamdemic and are announcing that they are looking for a new way to make a lot more money.
Its Covid-19 vaccine and drug powered Pfizer to more than $100 billion in sales last year, the first drugmaker to break the barrier. Shares soared, as Wall Street hailed the company for its savvy, fast and ultimately lucrative pivot to taking on the virus.
But many people have moved on from the pandemic. Sales from the two products dropped so much, so rapidly they contributed to Pfizer’s overall sales falling sizably in its most recent quarter compared with the period a year earlier. The company dialed back the top end of its expectations for the full-year performance.
Apparently obl;ivious to how obvious they are being, they also write,
And Pfizer’s ambitious expectations for launches of new products might be difficult to pull off in today’s tightfisted healthcare environment.
Pfizer has “gotten a lot of things over the finish line, and there’s still some more to go, but they’re asking a lot of those products to contribute in a relatively narrow time frame before year end,” Barclays analyst Carter Gould said.
The strategy paid off handsomely during the pandemic. Shares reached a record high of roughly $61 in December 2021 as the Omicron variant spread throughout the world and Pfizer shipped billions of Covid-19 shots. Pfizer developed the shot with Germany’s BioNTech.
The return to Earth has been abrupt. Earlier this year, Pfizer said it expects its Covid-19 vaccine to generate $13.5 billion in sales in 2023, down roughly two-thirds from last year. The company said its Paxlovid antiviral would bring in about $8 billion in sales this year, down 58% from last year.
Sales for the products are lower this year because governments have purchased fewer contracts and the U.S. is transitioning to a commercial market. Doctors are also writing fewer Paxlovid prescriptions.
“A key driver will be the magnitude of the next Covid wave and whether it drives people to be vaccinated at a higher rate or not,” Risinger said. “Covid fatigue and vaccine hesitancy adds additional uncertainty about what the future demand will be for Covid vaccinations.”
Pfizer said last week, when reporting quarterly earnings, that it should have more clarity on future demand for its pandemic products by the end of the year. By then, it will have rolled out its latest Covid-19 shot through the traditional commercial market.
Should sales fail to materialize, Pfizer is prepared to trim R&D spending for Covid-19 and other disease areas, Chief Executive Albert Bourla said in an interview.
“We are moving post-Covid,” Bourla said.
Pfizer lowered its growth-rate target for this year, citing the FDA’s decision to approve a cancer drug for a smaller patient population than the company expected and the federal government’s recommendation for a new RSV vaccine falling short of company expectations.
Recent damage from a tornado to a North Carolina manufacturing plant might also jeopardize sales, Chief Financial Officer David Denton said.
To date this year, the FDA has approved four Pfizer medicines. The company is more than halfway through its goal of rolling out 19 new drugs or expanded uses over 18 months through the first half of 2024.
An experimental multiple myeloma drug called elranatamab that is up for FDA approval could generate about $1 billion in sales in 2030, according to Jefferies analyst Akash Tewari.
Recent tornado damage to a Pfizer manufacturing plant in Rocky Mount, N.C., could jeopardize sales this year, the company has said.
Effective from 12:01am Tuesday 15 August, 7 day mandatory isolation, wearing of face masks for visitors to healthcare facilities removed.
The Government is removing the remaining COVID-19 public health requirements, effective from 12:01am tomorrow, Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall announced today.
Note that “769 million confirmed cases of Covid-19” ÷ 6,955,141 “cumulative deaths” = 110.56569521739387 which = a 1.105656952173939 % fatality rate.
3.4 % is more than 3 times 1.105656952173939 %. Also, 1.105656952173939 % is not, as Trump says in the video in the piece, way under 1 %. However, notice that other sources, such as Fauci (see this point in video) also said that it was “considerably” lower than 1 %. Yet, as you can see, the propaganda machine said it was dangerous disinformation.
the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.
correspond to an infection fatality rate of 0.12% (65/53 000), 0.17% (90/53 000; preferred) and 0.2% (106/53 000).
Those 3 estimates average to 0.16 % which, by the way, is a small fraction of the 3.4 % you can see the mainstream media outlets claiming in the video.
PCR test intended for the qualitative detection of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2 in upper and lower respiratory specimens
with, for example, nasal swabs or lower respiratory aspirates, as it states on page 3,
collected from individuals suspected of COVID-19 by their healthcare provider.
In a footnote they elaborate that in this context
a healthcare provider includes, but is not limited to, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, technologists, laboratory directors, epidemiologists, or any other practitioners or allied health professionals.
To aspirate (verb) is to breathe in air or to breathe in a substance. An aspirate (noun) is
a substance, usually a liquid, that has been removed from a space in the body using suction
To be clear, just as HIV is the name of the virus that causes the disease called AIDS, SARS-CoV-2 is
the virus that causes COVID-19
also known as
novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV, also referred to as SARS-CoV-2)
as it states on page 4. Lower on page 3 of the it states when medical facilities test for it,
negative results do not preclude SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for treatment or other patient management decisions. Negative results must be combined with clinical observations, patient history, and epidemiological information.
In light of all those who said it was racist to say that the virus came from Wuhan in China, it is interesting to note how it states on page 4,
An outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China was initially reported to WHO on December 31, 2019. Chinese authorities identified a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV, also referred to as SARS-CoV-2)
At any rate, on page 40, under Performance Characteristics and Analytical Performance: Limit of Detection (LoD), it explains that the Limit of Detection (LoD) established for this study
the lowest detectable concentration of 2019-nCoV.
Getting to what Jon Rappaport was pointing to, the document then states on page 40 that
no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV were available for CDC use at the time the test was developed and this study conducted,
and that, therefore, for this study, rather than using a specimen of the virus, they used samples that they say
mimic clinical specimen
of, well, it’s complicated (see page 40) but they didn’t use the virus to determine what it was they are looking for because no such virus was available. What they used to “mimic” the virus that they say existed but which they could not find, seems, well, archaic, almost like mad science, alchemy or just charlatanism. You see, as they say, the assays designed to mimic the alleged virus
were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA (N gene; GenBank accession: MN908947.2) of known titer (RNA copies/µL) spiked into a diluent consisting of a suspension of human A549 cells and viral transport medium (VTM) to mimic clinical specimen. Samples were extracted using the QIAGEN EZ1 Advanced XL instrument and EZ1 DSP Virus Kit (Cat# 62724) and manually with the QIAGEN DSP Viral RNA Mini Kit (Cat# 61904). Real-Time RT-PCR assays were performed using the Thermo Fisher Scientific TaqPath™ 1-Step RT-qPCR Master Mix, CG (Cat# A15299) on the Applied Biosystems™ 7500 Fast Dx RealTime PCR Instrument according to the CDC 2019-nCoV Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel instructions for use.
In other words, let’s take human cells and add our
characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA
and assume that tests that show positive for this concoction are accurate tests for the virus they could not actually find in tact. That’s what Jon Rappaport was reporting on.
In the Summary and Explanation of the document, it
An outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China was initially reported to WHO on December 31, 2019. Chinese authorities identified a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV, also referred to as SARS-CoV-2), which has resulted in millions of confirmed human infections globally. Cases of asymptomatic infection, mild illness, severe illness, and deaths have been reported.
As Rappaport concludes in his piece about this study with
I guess that means trucks were not available to bring the virus from that lab to the CDC. The trucks were out of gas. It was raining. The bridge was washed out. The trucks were in the shop. Joe, the driver, couldn’t find his mask, and he didn’t want to leave home without it…
Science is not assumptions.
The pandemic is a fraud, down to the root of the poisonous tree.
the scientific process described within it has been misrepresented.
They write (refering to what is actually written on page 40) that
on page 39, the document outlines how the “analytical sensitivity” of the PCR assays were determined.
“Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV are currently available, assays designed for detection of the 2019-nCoV RNA were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA (N gene; GenBank accession: MN908947.2)”, it reads.
They go on to explain that according to some,
this paragraph is evidence that the virus does not exist and that the pandemic is a hoax.
They add,
Dr Thushan de Silva, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease, told Reuters that this was not correct.
De Silva said that the document is describing what was used to determine the lowest amount of viral genetic material the RT-PCR assay could detect.
“They describe a very common process during assay set up, where the limit of detection of the RT-PCR assay was determined”, he said.
In this case, the CDC have used ‘transcribed’ RNA as the positive control - which means they used synthetically produced genetic material identical to that carried by the virus.
As you can see for yourself, the document did not say that they used genetic material that is identical to that of the virus. The document states that what they used as a stand-in for the virus in absense of it was something that mimiced the virus. To mimic is to simulate or to have an effect that is similar to an other. “Identical” was invalidly inserted by this Reuters report. The continue,
“To calculate the limit of detection of an RT-PCR assay, you need to have a known quantity of virus to extract genetic material (RNA) from, or alternatively a known quantity of RNA identical to that carried by the virus ”, de Silva said.
Nope. Identical was not mentioned or implied. This is incorrect at best and perhaps deliberate deception.
According to de Silva, one reason for using transcribed RNA would have been that at the time of set up, not many standardised and quantified viral stocks would have been available to extract viral RNA from.
Wrong again. The document stated that there were none available.
De Silva maintains that using transcribed RNA rather than RNA extracted from quantified viral stocks is no reason to question the existence of SARS-CoV-2.
“There are now hundreds of stocks of cultured SARS-CoV-2 in laboratories around the world”, he said.
If that last part is true, it is beside the point entirely. This is what we come to expect from such so-called ‘fact checking’. The add,
VERDICT
False. While the document is authentic, the scientific process described within it has been misrepresented.
Yes, it has in fact been misrepresented by this Reuters article and this Dr Thushan de Silva, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease.
Nearly 99% of the COVID-19 deaths reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week were not primarily caused by the coronavirus, new data shows.
Keep in mind that the CDC stated that if a patient dies and from a given cause of death and it is supected that they had the virus (even if no test for it is conducted) then they can record the death as having been caused by the virus.
Early on, the CDC officially announced to medical professionals that they can record deaths of patients as being caused by covid-19 without testing for it. You may have heard of cases in which a person dies from something other than covid-19, but their death is recorded as being caused by covid-19 because they tested positive for the flu (covid). But did you know that they don’t even have to test for it? Did you know that they can just conclude that a death is caused by covid-19 without testing for it in the first place? When the guidelines themselves allow for it, what is to prevent them from lying? [archive]
For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.
I have to wonder if hospitals might have some sort of financial incentive to inflate those numbers. They wouldn’t receive more money from the government (that is, from tax payers) if they inflate the numbers, would they? Nah, they’re not fallible like we. They are not subject to human failings like greed and ambition. They wouldn’t be dishonest for money. They’re doctors and nurses. They are without sin, the new holy and infallible priesthood.
Oh wait.
They are human and they do have a financial incentive to report more cases of covid-19 according to the CDC [archive] and the media [archive].
Finally,
Even if that figure from Fauci were accurate, far more Americans die from other causes according to the CDC. [archive] If, for example, more Americans die from cancer and if possibly more Americans die from auto-accidents or from smoking or from poor diet leading to deaths from things like heart disease, stroke or diabetes, or even, potentially from the flu or pneumonia, then why haven’t drastic measures, even the blatant violation of people’s rights, been taken for these causes of death?
Here’s the CDC’s figures,
Number of deaths for leading causes of death:
Heart disease: 659,041
Cancer: 599,601
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 173,040
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 156,979
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 150,005
Alzheimer’s disease: 121,499
Diabetes: 87,647
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 51,565
Influenza and Pneumonia: 49,783
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,511
Since I mentioned smoking, let me remind us all that tobacco companies can pay to ensure “the” science “said” that smoking cigarettes was safe just like pharmaceutical companies (like Johnson and Johnson which has been sued many times for their products) can pay to ensure “the” science says their vaccines are safe.
A single death is sad. Thousands of deaths are far more sad.
Let us not, however, fail to maintain proportion and, well, sanity.
Professional liars, politicians, pharmaceutical representatives, lawyers, talking heads in the media, and so on - they all hack away at the Tree of Liberty.
They incited fear and out of fear we handed them the axes they use to plunder lumber from the Tree. We must regain sanity, defend Liberty. We must wrest the axes from their greedy grip and never let them attack the Tree of Liberty again.
Covid was to blame for just 1 percent of weekly deaths from all causes across the US in the most recent week, CDC data shows.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Covid dashboard shows 324 Covid deaths were registered in the week ending August 19 - making up just 1.7 percent of the overall fatalities that week.
Just 1.7 percent of the 324 deaths from all causes during the week ending Aug. 19 listed the virus
The primary or underlying cause of death is defined as the disease, situation or event that initiated the chain of events directly resulting in death.
The percentage of Covid deaths in the week ending Aug. 19 represents a slight increase from the previous week and continues a five-week upward trend, but is a drastic decline from the peak of the pandemic, when 30 percent of deaths listed Covid as a cause.
The dashboard shows Washington, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maryland and New York all have higher rates of deaths due to Covid. Maryland and Florida have the highest, at 3.4 percent.
Washington, Tennessee, North Carolina and New York all hover around 2 percent.
Data also shows the death rate is slightly higher among women than men, and death rates are highest in people 75 years and older.
The new Covid data will be reassuring at a time when panic is rising across the US as highly transmissible new Covid variants circulate, leading to more infections and hospitalizations and causing the reimplementation of some Covid mandates.
New variants EG.5, or Eris, and BA.8.26, or Pirola, have been detected in several countries around the globe and in the US recently.
These variants are highly mutated and thought to be better at avoiding vaccine and natural immunity, causing more infections.
Infections appear to have doubled across the US amid the emergence of these variants and hospital admissions among people with the virus have risen for the fifth week in a row - but still remain at near-historic lows.
The above graph shows the percent of positive Covid cases (tan line) and the weekly number of new Covid hospitalizations (blue bars) as of the week ending Aug. 12
Rutgers University in New Jersey and Morris Brown College in Georgia, both announced last week face masks will once again be required for staff and students.
Additionally, Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, California, and Upstate Community Hospital in Syracuse, New York, have both brought back mask mandates for doctors, nurses, patients and visitors.
Last week in Kentucky, the Lee County School District canceled classes less than two weeks after opening because nearly one-fifth of its students were out sick with a 'tripledemic' illness, including Covid, strep throat and the flu.
On Friday, President Biden said his administration will 'likely' recommend Americans receive another Covid booster vaccine in the coming weeks.
He signed a proposal on Friday asking Congress for more funding to update Covid vaccines to better protect against the new variants.
However, there is little interest among Americans to receive boosters and only 18 percent of eligible Americans have received any version of a booster.
BREAKING: According to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, an estimated $280 BILLION of COVID aid was stolen by criminals inside and outside of the US.
Organized crime rings & foreigners in Russia, China, & Nigeria are suspected to have stolen at least half of the funds intended for struggling Americans suffering under lockdowns and forced business closures.
Scandinavia’s largest country avoided lockdowns and mask mandates. The result: fewer excess deaths and much less social damage.
Residents board a local bus in central Uppsala, Sweden, in 2020. During the COVID pandemic, Swedish authorities imposed no mask mandate.CLAUDIO BRESCIANI/TT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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.
