We Need To Talk About Sweden
Sweden was demonized for its COVID response. How is it faring now?
I’m guessing there aren’t too many areas in which an international socialist organization and Donald Trump would find themselves in agreement, but in the summer of 2020 they could at least agree on one thing: Sweden’s “lax” approach to the COVID-19 pandemic was reckless and irresponsible, and many people were going to die as a result.
The Swedish approach was described in October of 2020 by Science Magazine as being “out of step with much of the world.”
The government never ordered a "shutdown" and kept day care centers and primary schools open. While cities worldwide turned into ghost towns, Swedes could be seen chatting in cafés and working out at the gym…
…Sweden adopted strikingly different policies from those of other European countries, out of a desire to avoid disrupting daily life—and perhaps the hope that, by paying an immediate price in illness, the country could achieve "herd immunity" and put the pandemic behind it.
The editors of Science pointed out at length how Sweden’s approach was risky and singular, and that the Swedes were risking lives by daring to differ.
For anyone following the news at that point of the pandemic, it was hard to believe anything else, as one media outlet after another piled on in their criticism of the Swedes. Despite the pressure, under the direction of chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, they decided to stick with less restrictive measures than other Western countries.
Almost every major newspaper, website, and scientific journal throughout 2020 and 2021 chimed in to vilify Sweden. Here are just a few examples:
New York Times:
LA Times:
ABC News (note that this one is from early 2022):
Here’s a list of headlines (from 2020) collected by Rachel E. Irwin in an excellent article on how the media handled Sweden’s approach in the journal Medical Anthropology:
Sweden bucks global trend with experimental virus strategy (Financial Times, March 25th)
Sweden girds for thousands of deaths amid laxer virus response (Bloomberg April 6th)
Sweden challenges Trump – and scientific mainstream – by refusing to lock down (CNN, 10th April)
Sweden’s government has tried a risky coronavirus strategy. It could backfire (Vox, April 9th)
Sweden grapples with high death toll after controversially refusing to lock down (New York Post, April 16th)
All eyes on Sweden’s liberal gamble with coronavirus (Irish Times, April 21st)
I could list a hundred more like these, but you get the overall picture. Let’s look at the Time magazine article from October 2020 in particular:
“We can predict the Swedish COVID experiment is almost certain to result in a net failure in terms of death and suffering,” the authors grimly proclaimed. Two things are worth noting about this proclamation:
1) it was (spoiler alert) not only wrong but resoundingly, catastrophically wrong (see below)
and
2) the authors implied that Sweden’s approach was an “experiment” when, in fact, the Swedes, under Tegnell, were actually following a carefully researched and formulated pandemic plan that had been in place for decades. The same plan, roughly, that was outlined in the 2019 WHO Pandemic Plan, whose tenets were reiterated in the Great Barrington Declaration, which co-author Jay Battacharya described at our Free Speech in Medicine Conference last year as “one of the least original things I’ve ever written. It was just reiterating what we’d always known.” The Swedes, in fact, were doing the tried and true thing—the same thing we’ve always done during respiratory pandemics. Everyone else was participating in an experiment. An experiment prompted by media-fuelled, Chinese Communist Party inspired panic which needed a deviant “other” to justify itself—hence the media vilification of Sweden’s calm and sensible approach.
To be clear on this point, the precautionary principle is an important concept in many fields, including medicine and public health. But it was not what the media suggested it to be. Properly applied, The precautionary principle could be paraphrased as “Don’t panic and start using untested approaches before ample consideration and testing, as they could be dangerous”. With COVID, the precautionary principle was bastardized and turned 180 degrees from its original intent. Instead, we took it to mean “We had better panic and start using things we have never done before, because if we don’t it could be dangerous”.
The negative effects of strict COVID mitigation policies have been discussed ad nauseum, but just to recap some of the highlights: on a worldwide basis, not only did lockdowns result in little or no reduction in COVID deaths, they have resulted in perhaps the biggest wealth transfer of all time. According to Oxfam International, the world’s ten richest men doubled their wealth during the first two years of the pandemic, while the real incomes of almost everyone else fell. A new billionaire was minted every 26 hours, while 160 million more people were forced into poverty.
Meanwhile, here in North America, we are left with crippling inflation, an unprecedented mental health crisis, a huge increase in alcohol related deaths, increased rates of obesity, the tragic aftermath of reduced rates of cancer screening (and other routine medical surveillance), massive increases in overdose deaths, an educational disaster that will effect vulnerable children for the rest of their lives, and a healthcare system that seems to have been pushed into terminal decline. Don’t even get me started on the intangible effects of our government’s experiment: What is the “cost” of not being able to hold your loved one’s hand while they are dying? Of not being able to have a funeral for them? What is the cost of not seeing human faces? Of disrupting the regular routine of an autistic child? How do we feel about the sacrifices that have been forced on us knowing, as we do now, that they did little or nothing to stop the spread of COVID?
But I digress. Back to Sweden. As of November 2020, this is how Sweden compared to its neighbours for cumulative excess all-cause mortality from Jan 2020 to Nov 2022:
The graph below shows what this looks like plotted over time, starting in January of 2020. As you can see, between March and October of 2020, Sweden had noticeably more excess deaths than its neighbours. As you can also see, this was far too early to draw any conclusions about the ultimate outcomes of differing policies. Note that the lines really began to diverge in Sweden’s favour in 2022 and seem to be diverging further as times goes on—presumably as the medium term effects of things like weight gain, increased alcohol and drug consumption and missed cancer screening play out :
Journalist Jon Miltimore summed up the benefits of Sweden’s approach this way:
Public officials made two serious mistakes above all others in their response to the virus. The first was assuming they possessed the knowledge and ability to contain a highly contagious respiratory virus through lockdowns and other NPIs. (ed: Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions like lockdowns, mask mandates, school and business closures and travel restrictions)
Many world-leading epidemiologists at the time, like Tegnell, saw the futility of such an approach.
“In early March 2020, when Italy and Iran started to report many COVID deaths as the first countries outside China, it was clear to any knowledgeable infectious disease epidemiologist that the virus would eventually spread to all parts of the world,” Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2015 to 2021, told me. “At the time, we only knew a small proportion of the actual cases, so it was clear that it had already spread elsewhere and that it would be futile to try and eliminate the disease with contact tracing and lockdowns.”
The second mistake public officials made was not considering the unintended consequences of their actions. The writer and economist Henry Hazlitt once pointed out this is one of the perennial flaws in policymaking.
“[There’s a] persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy,” Hazlitt wrote in Economics in One Lesson, “and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups.”
Hazlitt described this as “the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.”
Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s strategy who recently joined the World Health Organization, was one of the only public health officials in the world who acknowledged these secondary consequences, predicting that “the consequences of shutting down the economy [would] far outweigh the benefits.”
Tegnell was right, the data show. And the critics of Sweden’s policy should acknowledge that.
Why we need to talk about Sweden
This should be an important story. The numbers don’t lie. Yet I found the above quote on an obscure website in a lightly travelled corner of the internet. You can find the truth about Sweden on Twitter (thank you, Elon) and Substack if you follow the right people. Any meaningful discussion of Sweden’s success (and its implications for how we handle future pandemics) has, however, been notably absent from mainstream media outlets.
Sweden was in the news every day when they were being vilified for being heartless grandma-murderers. But now that it is clear they charted the right path through the pandemic …crickets…
I have no doubt that the majority of people continue to believe that Sweden got it wrong.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Those who refuse to acknowledge history will never have any idea what the truth actually was in the first place.
Great article.
I wrote quite a bit about Covid issues and our responses, especially in the earlier going.... frankly embarrassed now to read what I wrote then. Many of us got swept up in the general panic of the time and tossed common sense and balance entirely overboard.
Kudos to the Swedes for keeping their heads, especially with the vitriol of the rest of the developed world being hurled at them..... but as you point out, precious little owning up to that, now.
Medicine has a helluva time with humility.
Thanks for another great article you consummate blasphemers! Let's hope the Sweden experience doesn't get memory-holed like so many former realities!