Sweden’s WHO figures must radically change the terms of the Covid inquiry - ""Judge me in a year" said Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s State Epidemiologist, in July 2020, when his country was being attacked for sticking to its pandemic plan rather than adopting the novel intervention of lockdown. The latest World Health Organisation figures add to the evidence that has been accumulating since summer 2021. Sweden managed the pandemic more successfully than most, with much less disruption of everyday life and economic activity.
Was lockdown all for nothing? - "According to the conventional wisdom on the Covid pandemic, countries that imposed the strictest restrictions on their citizens saved the most lives... the latest estimates of excess deaths during the pandemic, produced by the World Health Organisation (WHO), blow this simplistic narrative out of the water... Sweden, everyone seemed to agree, was conducting a dangerous ‘experiment’ in ‘Swedo-science’, which had ‘well and truly failed’. Swedes had opted to ‘live free and die’, claimed the proponents of lockdown. But the WHO’s excess-death estimates paint a radically different picture. Even with its no-lockdown policy, Sweden experienced some of the lowest excess-death rates in the EU between January 2020 and January 2022. Many will also be surprised by the UK’s middling performance. ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston, says he finds it ‘striking’ that the UK ‘no longer seems to have had the worst death rate among richer countries’... The conventional narrative goes something like this: the UK suffered the worst Covid death toll in Europe because our ‘libertarian’ prime minister, Boris Johnson, deliberately pursued a strategy of ‘herd immunity’. Johnson had planned to ‘let the virus rip’, we were told. Then he reluctantly agreed to listen to the scientists and lock us down, but only once the pressure had become overwhelming. By this telling, all three of England’s national lockdowns were introduced far too late and lifted far too early. Worse still, in the summer of 2020 government policy actively encouraged indoor mixing and viral spread by subsidising half-price meals at restaurants. The government’s shriller critics on Twitter even accused Johnson of undertaking a #ToryGenocide. When England finally lifted most of its Covid restrictions on 19 July 2021 – a month later than planned and some seven months after the vaccine rollout began – we were told to expect a bloodbath. Over 1,200 scientists and government advisers from across the world signed an open letter denouncing the lifting of lockdown as a ‘dangerous and unethical experiment’ that threatened the whole world. They feared that the diseased gammon of England, newly free to make physical contact with each other, would incubate and spread a new vaccine-resistant Covid variant. There is no question that the UK government made many horrific mistakes during the pandemic – not least in sending untested and even Covid-positive patients into care homes during the first wave. But in terms of excess deaths, when ranked against the EU 27, the UK comes a very average 15th... Germany was held up as a model to follow. Germany seemingly did everything ‘right’. It locked down at a sensible time when the virus first arrived in Europe. And last year it only opened up society when it had a vaccine-passport system in place. In the winter of 2021, it barred unvaccinated people from much of public life. Other, less convincing reasons for Germany’s Covid ‘success’ were given, too. At the time, Germany was led by Angela Merkel, who had trained as a scientist. This apparently made her more rational and at ease with the data than other world leaders. She was also a woman, and according to an early ‘study’ in 2020, countries with female leaders performed ‘systematically and significantly better’ in the pandemic. Plus, we were told, Germany is just a sensible, rational, ‘grown-up country’ that does things ‘better’ than the rest of Europe. Yet according to the WHO, Germany actually suffered more excess deaths per capita than the UK, Spain and Portugal. So why do the excess-death figures not fit the narrative we’ve become accustomed to? One reason is that the excess-death numbers can reveal which countries underreported Covid deaths. Germany, for instance, seems to have significantly underreported its true Covid death toll. Another is that lockdown is simply nowhere near as effective as its proponents have made out. Only a handful of places ever managed to keep Covid rates to near-zero levels using lockdowns and border controls. And as the seemingly never-ending, terrifying Shanghai lockdown shows, even the harshest measures can buckle under more transmissible new variants. Then there is the fact that the excess-death figures encompass all causes of death – not just deaths from Covid... the excess-death numbers also capture the indirect, non-Covid deaths caused by Covid policy – by lockdown, by disruption to healthcare, among other causes"
So much for the cope that the 2021 excess deaths were low because everyone had already died
Sweden's no-lockdown COVID strategy was broadly correct, commission suggests - "Sweden should have adopted tougher early measures and the government assumed clearer leadership as COVID-19 hit, though the mostly voluntary no-lockdown strategy was broadly correct, a commission reviewing the country's pandemic response said... Figures from statistics agency Eurostat showed the country had 7.7 per cent more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years, among the lowest excess mortality rates in Europe."
Free Observer - Posts | Facebook - "The Economist reports that Sweden - that intrepid place that did not lock down - has the lowest excess all-cause mortality of any European country this year. Interesting!"
Weird. The whole of Sweden was supposed to die out due to irresponsible covid policy
Covid hystericists love to compare Sweden to its neighbours to claim it failed, but Iceland and Estonia are also Northern European countries (and Iceland is Nordic too) and they had high excess deaths over the course of the pandemic too
Plus, Sweden had 59% the excess death rate of Finland from Dec 21 2020 to Dec 21 2021
And as of May 4, the central estimate of excess deaths from Jan 2020 to the present is less than 10% above Finland so even if you ignore the non-death harms of lockdowns, Sweden is doing alright
Death and Lockdowns - "Public-health officials widely denounced Sweden for refusing to lock down and mandate masks last spring, when its Covid-19 mortality was high. A computer model projected nearly 100,000 Swedish deaths from the virus last year. But that prediction turned out to be ten times too high, and other countries have since caught up with Sweden. While it suffered another outbreak this winter, mainly in regions that were not hit hard in the spring, Sweden’s cumulative death toll per capita from Covid-19 is now slightly below the European Union’s average and about 20 percent lower than America’s... By any measure of excess mortality, Sweden has fared much better than countries with especially strict lockdowns and mask mandates, like the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal. It hasn’t done as well as Norway and Finland, where mortality has been no higher than normal (and below normal, by some calculations). Critics have often noted this disparity as an argument against Sweden’s approach. But the problem with this “Neighbor Argument,” as Oxford’s Paul Yowell calls it, is that the neighbors have followed policies like Sweden’s for most of the pandemic. Norway and Finland were stricter than Sweden in the spring, when they quickly imposed border controls and closed schools and some businesses. But they also reopened quickly and during the rest of the year ranked among the least restrictive countries in Europe. All three Nordic countries have imposed on-and-off restrictions in some areas during outbreaks this winter, but they have avoided extended national lockdowns and other strict measures. Finland recently mandated masks on public transportation, but Norway and Sweden still merely recommend it for commuters; otherwise, they remain among the few countries in Europe without mask mandates. In all three countries, businesses and schools have remained open most of the past year, and relatively few people have worn masks on the streets or in stores, offices, or classrooms. Sweden’s higher rate of mortality among the Nordics may be related to the greater number of international travelers arriving there last year, due partly to its looser border-control policies and partly to its larger population of immigrants. Another explanation for last year’s high mortality rate is what researchers call the “dry tinder” factor: the previous flu seasons in Sweden had been exceptionally mild, leaving an unusually large number of frail elderly people who were especially vulnerable to Covid-19. (This same factor contributed to the high death toll last year in the United States, where flu mortality had also been low the previous two winters.) If you compensate for this factor by averaging mortality in Sweden over 2019 and 2020, the age-adjusted mortality rate is about the same as during the previous few years. The three Nordic countries have all done much better than the United States in preventing excess deaths, and there’s one especially troubling difference: the rate of excess mortality among younger people. That rate soared last year among Americans in lockdown, but not among the Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns, who kept going to school, working, and socializing without masks during the pandemic. In fact, among people aged 15 to 64 in each of the Nordic countries, there have been fewer deaths than normal since the pandemic began... needless deaths are the greatest scandal of the pandemic. “Lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford Medical School. “We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.” He describes the lockdowns as “trickle-down epidemiology.” Public-health officials are supposed to consider the overall impact of their policies, not just the immediate effect on one disease. They’re supposed to weigh costs and benefits, promoting policies that save the most total years of life, which means taking special care to protect younger people and not divert vast resources to treatments for those near the end of life. They are not supposed to test unproven and dangerous treatments by conducting experiments on entire populations... The lockdown enforcers made no effort to weigh the costs and benefits—and ignored analyses showing that, even if the lockdowns worked as advertised, they would still cost more years of life than they saved. During the spring, panicked officials claimed the lockdowns were a temporary measure justified by projections that hospitals would be overwhelmed. But then the lockdowns continued long after it became clear that the projections were wildly wrong."
A lot of non-liberals mock studies which show "obvious" results as having "water is wet" findings. But "common sense" isn't always right
Sebastian Rushworth M.D. on Twitter - "This is Sweden: 11 days and counting without a single covid death. The tube is packed and not a face mask in sight."
How Sweden swerved Covid disaster - "Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China... The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.” Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020... the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states. This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist... And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach. DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%... It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again."
Meme - "Sweden's 7-day average COVID deaths have been at ZERO for about a month now. I feel like its only a matter of time before the very existence of a place called Sweden is scrubbed from the internet."
"It's important to note that 90% of people over the age of 60 have been vaccinated in Sweden. Whereas a person in Texas will read this and double down on Jesus as the cure"
"86% of Texans over 60 have had at least one dose. That's pretty close to 90 especially taking into count how many more folks live in Texas than Sweden."
If Sweden’s Covid strategy is such a disaster, why is it still so popular? - "Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist, says it’s too early to judge because it takes years for any post-pandemic picture to settle. But a recent poll showed three-quarters of Swedes have their minds made up, saying Tegnell’s team has handled things either well or very well. So how to reconcile Swedish confidence with the story of Swedish disaster? For a start, much of what’s said about Sweden is false. The argument that its “herd immunity strategy” failed to stem the virus is fairly easily answered: there never was such a strategy. Tegnell has always said so. He sought to keep virus levels low enough to stop hospitals being overwhelmed – but, also, minimise the collateral damage to people’s lives and health. This would always mean tolerating higher Covid levels than in locked-down countries, as the price of protecting more lives overall. Another fallacy is the idea of Sweden as a restriction-free utopia. Bars, restaurants and cafes are all socially distanced and must close by 8.30pm. Millions of Swedes have been working from home since all of this started. A rule of eight is in place, albeit with private homes exempt. So there are some laws, but most is guidance... If you look only at Covid deaths then Sweden does as badly as Britain, at least in the first wave (not the second, which is very much still ongoing). But factor in collateral damage, and things change. Studies of all age-adjusted deaths – not just deaths from the virus – shows an increase of just 1.5 per cent in Sweden last year: England’s were up 10 per cent. Excess deaths among under-65s actually fell in Sweden but rose sharply here. A lockdown effect, or only a coincidence? It’s hard to tell. But in Sweden, such jigsaw pieces matter: it always was about the whole picture. Swedish pupils up to the age of 16 still haven’t missed a day of school: this also has a value, albeit one that’s harder to quantify. The Institute for Fiscal Studies guesses £350 billion of lost earnings for British children. But the impact on society – not least on the thousands of pupils who have mysteriously vanished from school rolls – is something you can’t put a price on. Judging economic damage is easier. By minimising disruption, Sweden’s economy shrank by 3 per cent last year: Britain’s plummeted by 10 per cent. Sweden’s budget, published yesterday, envisages the economy making a full recovery from the pandemic by Christmas. Britain is shooting for mid-2022, even with our vaccine success. The cost of the pandemic (measured by extra public debt) is heading for £7,700 per head in Britain by next year, more than twice as much as in Sweden. Per capita, they (still) have less Covid death. Sweden’s fast recovery means its furlough scheme has almost run out of takers. At the last count, almost five million Brits were still on furlough, unsure if their job will exist at the end of all this. And while Tegnell didn’t expect a vaccine, its arrival hasn’t changed his lockdown strategy. Or, it seems, ours. It’s always tough to make meaningful comparisons between different economies, but cancer diagnosis is easier. Fear of a virus keeps people away from hospitals. Swedish breast cancer referrals were down by about 10 per cent in the first ten months of last year. But the British figures are far steeper: a roughly 30 per cent decline in breast cancer referrals, for example. The question – still waiting for a clear answer – is how far lockdowns raise the death toll by discouraging use of basic healthcare. For cancer, heart disease and more."
Neither Zero Covid nor Vaccinations will Allow us to Return to Normality: We Must Learn To Live With Covid - "As Australia clearly shows, a ‘zero Covid’ approach is not a way out of the pandemic but only prolongs the agony. Australia is exceedingly boastful of its record during the pandemic, recording under 31,000 cases and just 910 deaths. However, Australia has not managed this feat thanks to a well-designed pandemic preparedness system. In fact, it was no better prepared than most neoliberal states, collapsing into extremely costly emergency lockdowns and internal and external border closures... Australia’s ‘zero Covid’ approach has also meant agony for thousands of its citizens stranded overseas. Some 34,000 remain unable to return home, because the Government has limited the number of inbound flights, pushing their costs to unaffordable levels (unless you are a wealthy celebrity). This limit in turn reflects the state’s inability to organise decent quarantine processes. As of February 2021, some 90% of Australia’s cases and deaths were traced to quarantine hotels. Bringing stranded citizens home therefore portends higher case numbers – irreconcilable with a ‘zero Covid’ objective. Consequently, they remain stuck overseas and even threatened with imprisonment if they try to return, with many sinking into destitution. This is an astonishing violation of citizens’ basic rights. Perhaps more astonishing still is the fact that two-thirds of Australians do not think the Government should do more to help their stranded compatriots. As it stands, most Australians seem happy with the Government’s official position that the country will remain hermetically sealed-off from the rest of the world for another two to three years. This toxic combination of government ineptitude and warped popular attitudes is now blocking Australia’s exit from the pandemic. The Government’s misplaced sense of pride in its ability to manage COVID-19 apparently blinded it to the necessity of securing an adequate supply of vaccines The Australian government’s newly announced four stage strategy to exit this doom-loop remains exceedingly vague. The first stage is actually a step backwards, with quarantine places set to half. The only positive aspect is the recognition that COVID-19 must eventually be managed in a way “consistent with public health management of other infectious diseases”, like influenza. This is an effective admission that the new coronavirus cannot be indefinitely suppressed – that is, ‘zero Covid’ is a ridiculous pipe dream. Indeed, it always has been: once a novel virus like this has achieved widespread community transmission, it inevitably becomes endemic in the human population, like influenza and the common cold. No country can avoid this fate, unless it remains permanently segregated from the rest of mankind. Australia is thus, belatedly and half-heartedly, embracing the inevitable, framing vaccination as the way to step back towards a more normal approach to the management of public health. However, the British experience reveals that vaccination is also insufficient to end the doom-loop of endless restrictions on our freedom... the really crucial milestone was reached back in spring. Over-50s and those with underlying health conditions account for 98 percent of deaths and 80 to 85 percent serious illness from Covid. Consequently, once this group is vaccinated, the major risks to the population as a whole are eliminated. Notwithstanding uneven take-up among ethnic-minorities and in poorer areas, this threshold has long since been crossed. And yet, Britain’s so-called ‘Freedom Day’ on June 21st – the point where all remaining restrictions were supposed to have been abolished – was postponed to July 19th. And rather than abolishing the restrictions, the Government has now merely devolved decision-making to businesses and other organisations, which will mostly perpetuate them in the name of “making people feel safe”. Half a million people per week are being told to self-isolate by the NHS app, causing serious harm to the NHS itself. Meanwhile, certain scientists and commentators continue to rail against the lifting of restriction, and reports suggest the Government is planning to extend emergency measures like lockdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing over the next five winters. It seems highly probable that, unless something shifts over the next couple of months, as cases inevitably rise over winter, alongside the seasonal flu epidemic, we will be plunged back into lockdown... ‘cases’ have always been an illegitimate way to measure the progress of the pandemic, because ‘case’ historically meant a clinical diagnosis accompanying actual symptoms, plus a positive test. Many ‘cases’ are entirely asymptomatic, yet there is precious little evidence that asymptomatic individuals spread the disease, despite this being a major assumption underpinning lockdown policy. More importantly, the extent of vaccination – which, combined with acquired immunity to COVID-19 and similar diseases – has clearly broken the link between infections, on the one hand, and hospitalisations and deaths, on the other (see Figure 1). Put simply, ‘cases’ may have been rising on July 19th, but hospitalisations and deaths remained relatively flat. In the week ending July 2nd, 109 people in England and Wales died with COVID-19 on their death certificate. We know that this measure over-records the impact of the virus, as not everyone with the disease is killed by it, but let’s accept this top-end figure for the sake of discussion. In the same period, there were 8,808 deaths from various causes; COVID-19 caused just 1.2% of these. The current level of deaths is actually well below the five-year average. As of July 15th, 3,964 patients were in hospital ‘with’ the disease, 551 of whom were being ventilated. Again, this is not a precise measure because many people are admitted to hospital for other reasons, then test positive for COVID-19 (as many as 40 percent acquiring the disease in the hospital itself)... Nonetheless, they clearly do not represent an existential threat to the NHS, which has over 122,000 beds in various specialisms in England alone. Indeed, the NHS has never been very close to being overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, even during the torrid winter of 2020-21 (see Figure 2). It strains credulity to believe that it will be overwhelmed this summer, when vaccination rates are so high, and vaccines are proven to reduce transmission, the severity of symptoms, and the risk of hospitalisation. And yet this appears to be believed by the self-same individuals who bash ‘anti-vaxxers’ as conspiracy theorists. Who are the true anti-vaxxers, if not people who implicitly deny the vaccines’ efficacy? Moreover, if we are genuinely concerned that NHS capacity might be exceeded, rather than simply agitating for continued restrictions on the citizenry, we ought to be asking why the NHS is so fragile. Why is the NHS so incapable of protecting us, such that we (still) have to protect it? Why, 18 months into a pandemic, is hospital bed capacity actually lower than at the start? Why is the NHS’s intensive care unit capacity so low compared to other similar countries – more than four times lower than the U.S. and Germany, for example? Why are we allowing the NHS app to produce widespread absenteeism among NHS staff, further limiting capacity? Why is in-hospital transmission so unacceptably high? These questions would at least move us in the right direction, because they would refocus attention on policy failure – on human factors, rather than fatalistically assuming that we must remain victims of natural forces beyond our control. Clearly, vaccination is not the magical escape route from lockdown that many thought it might be. Restrictions – and public demand for them – can persist even when high vaccination rates have transformed the relationship between cases and deaths, and the continued disease burden, is readily manageable with existing public health resources. Why? Answering this question involves reflecting on why they were imposed in the first place – and thus turns less on issues of vaccination rates and hospitalisation data, and more on problems of politics and social psychology. Lockdowns and other societal restrictions were never recommended in pre-Covid pandemic planning by the World Health Organisation or national governments, because they were of unproven and dubious efficacy and came at tremendous cost. That most countries collapsed into some form of lockdown, throwing out their existing pandemic planning, thus indicates decisions taken in moments of panic, amid mounting, media-induced fear among the general public. In most (though not all) countries, governments lacked the necessary authority to resist such pressure and hold to existing plans, which focused on delaying the spread of new diseases and mitigating their impact. Crucially, moreover, in many places, including Britain and Australia, the state was also very poorly prepared to do even this. Successive governments failed to invest in necessary capacities, outsourcing planning and preparedness to local authorities and private companies. Consequently, existing systems soon collapsed, adding to the sense of panic... Lockdown was thus the result of panic and state failure. It appealed to politicians because it gave the public what they seemed to be clamouring for, and bought time to organise a better response. The trouble is that justifying and securing compliance with such draconian measures entailed a colossal propaganda effort that has permanently skewed public perceptions of the virus, and inverted the proper relationship between state and citizen. As Laura Dodsworth chronicles in A State of Fear, the U.K. Government deliberately mobilised behavioural psychology to instil fear into the population to increase compliance with lockdown measures. The media has followed suit for its own purposes. A conformist culture ensued in which dissenting voices – even among world-leading scientists – have been silenced, censored, or subjected to abuse. Sceptics are derided as “Covidiots”, “selfish morons” and people who want to “kill granny”. The proper relationship between citizen and state in a democracy has been turned on its head, with the Government telling the public what to do, rather than vice-versa, and demanding that people stay home to “protect the NHS”, when the NHS’s job is actually to protect us. This combines with the ‘sunk costs fallacy’: our reluctance to admit that previous decisions were mistaken due to the costs they have already imposed, which pushes us to double-down on those decisions. The politicians in charge can never admit that lockdown policies were disproportionate because the costs they have imposed on society are colossal. But the same extends to the official opposition, who have – if anything – only demanded stricter measures. Parliament also remains fundamentally delinquent: having declared its work inessential in March 2020, it is still not functioning normally today, limiting still further the capacity for critical self-reflection. Equally, thanks to the politicisation of science that accompanies technocracy, many scientists have become cheerleaders for lockdowns. Their reputations would be destroyed were it to be admitted that they did more harm than good. Many ordinary people have also made such significant sacrifices – some of them genuinely appalling and inhumane – that it would be traumatic to consider that they were perhaps illegitimate. The issue of ‘sunk costs’ must be a reason why, even today, we still lack a serious official cost-benefit analysis of lockdown policy. The only analysis ever published by the U.K. Government is a flimsy document from November 2020, which declined to use the normal quantitative measures used to justify health interventions – “quality-adjusted life years” (QALY) – presumably because it would reveal that lockdowns could not be justified. Normally, when deciding whether to fund a treatment or intervention, the NHS weighs the cost against the number of QALYs it would save, with each QALY valued at £30,000. Independent analysis suggests that each QALY would have to be valued at between £96,000 and £1.97m for lockdown to make sense, depending on how effective lockdowns are in preventing deaths (itself a matter of some dispute, with many studies arguing that they are ineffective). The stated desire of many people to continue practising restrictions even after they are lifted also reveals the way in which hyper-hygiene has become a marker of moral superiority. When mask-wearing is (falsely) advertised as a way to protect others, naturally, it becomes virtuous to wear a mask. Moreover, this virtue is openly broadcast to others at relatively low cost. When others decline to wear masks, this allows one to signal not just moral virtue but also moral superiority. As one prominent commentator puts it: “In a nutshell, post July 29th [sic] there will be people prepared to wear masks because they care about other people. And those who don’t. And that’s it, isn’t it?” Here, pandemic politics intersect with Britain’s tedious culture wars in which left-liberals continuously seek to assert their superiority over the masses of racist, sexist, transphobic (etc.) troglodytes that supposedly constitute the bulk of the population. This, rather than any rational assessment, presumably lies behind the assertion of 1,200 scientists that unlocked Britain will become a breeding ground for lethal variants of COVID-19: they are unable to see their fellow citizens as constituting anything more than a fetid Petri dish. The panicked retreat into lockdown and the subsequent reign of terror has destroyed our societies’ normal capacity to assess risk and make rational trade-offs, while playing into some very negative cultural tendencies. We have focused myopically on a single disease, to the exclusion of all other health problems, many of which will be exacerbated by lockdowns. We have also lost sight of a host of other social values, inflicting enormous damage on young people’s education, socialisation and wellbeing, not to mention the corrosive impact on civil liberties and democracy. Through a one-eyed focus on a single disease – one with an average infection fatality rate of 0.05% for the under-70s – we have made a small number of epidemiologists the arbiters of human flourishing, and they will not easily relinquish their newfound power and status. Vaccination can never be a silver bullet for these problems, which can only be confronted collectively, through vigorous public debate and political activism. It will be very difficult indeed to shift mindsets and unpick the authoritarian ways of thinking and governing that have taken hold over the past 18 months. ‘Shots in arms’ is child’s play by comparison."
Sweden Halts Moderna Vaccine For Young People Over Possible Rare Side Effects
Covid hystericists already hate Sweden, so this will just be more fodder for them to get upset about
Sweden Scraps Vax Passes as the Latest Euro State to Dump Lockdown
