Sweden Was Right All Along

By Tea Lynn Moore

Sweden: The Control Group

Remember the early days of the pandemic, when we first locked down and everyone was exhorting us to “follow the science”? The injunction made little sense because: what science? Never in human history have all healthy people around the globe been confined to their homes for months without an end in sight. What about the unintended deaths that would occur as a result of a lack of health care, sunlight, and exercise, and an increase in poverty and depression? Where was the cost-benefit analysis? What research was done? The answer, at the time, was none. Today, however, the results are in. We have our trial group (the world) and our control group ­— the one country that held out — Sweden.

Remember Sweden back in 2020? The country was relentlessly attacked by mainstream media for daring to approach the pandemic with the same weapon that’s been used since the dawn of humanity: herd immunity. They dared to allow their citizens to live freely! There were no lockdowns, school closures, or mask mandates in Sweden.

It’s true that at one point in May 2020, Sweden did have the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world. But today, the number of COVID-19 deaths and all-cause mortality deaths they’ve experienced since the start of the pandemic pales in comparison to other European nations.

Eurostat Data

Recent data by Statistics Sweden/Eurostat published in Svenska Dagbladet (by Therese Bergstedt and Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell at www.svd.se) shows that in the pandemic years 2020-2022, Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest, not only in the European Union but of all the Nordic countries, beating even global COVID-19 success stories, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland.

The data, collected from Statistics Sweden in collaboration with Eurostat, calculated the cumulative number of deaths in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and compared the figures with an average of expected deaths. The expected average value is based on death statistics from three years before the outbreak of the pandemic, i.e. the years 2017-2019.

That finding blows the case for lockdowns out of the water. In the early days of the pandemic, when the Swedish Government was being criticized for what looked like a high death rate (largely because sick patients were sent to care homes), Swedish medical advisers urged us to wait until all the evidence was in.

They had a point. COVID was a new disease, and countries had wildly differing approaches to measuring it. There was debate about whether people had died “of COVID” or “with COVID” and questions about if there was adequate testing (or too much).

But one thing that no one can fake is the overall number of deaths. We know how many people die annually in each country. We can predict, based on population size and age, what the figure should be for any given year. The excess mortality figure, the percentage above the expected baseline, can be calculated with the same methodology throughout the world. It is, in short, the one statistic that there is no getting away from.

Judged by this metric, the one real outlier was Sweden, which had the lowest excess mortality in Europe, and one of the lowest in the world, throughout 2020 and 2021.

In 2020, many assumed that Sweden would emerge with a higher death rate, but a much stronger economy. But according to Our World in Data, Sweden had a perfectly average COVID-19 death rate compared to other Western nations. What is astonishing is that Sweden’s pandemic response (or lack thereof) led to far fewer people dying overall during the pandemic. It seems the lethal impact of the lockdowns themselves was vastly underestimated (or vastly undermined) by officials. And officials are not loving the fact that they’ve been proven wrong.

Officials’ Response

Leaked WhatsApp messages by Matt Hancock (UK’s Health Secretary of State during COVID) referred in his messages to the “f***ing Sweden argument”, and asked officials to “supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong”.

But Sweden was not wrong, and no amount of desperate deflection can disguise it. The horrible truth is that lockdowns killed people. Sweden had lots of coronavirus cases but relatively few excess deaths.

Will politicians ever admit that the challenges we experienced and are still experiencing — undiagnosed diseases, isolation, obesity, debt, poverty, lost education, inflation, mental health problems — are unnecessary government-inflicted harms.

Let’s share this information widely, or we will go into the next manufactured crisis with the same skewed incentives.