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  • ‘Laissez-Faire’ Sweden Had the Lowest Mortality in Europe From 2020–2022, New Analysis Shows

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Gore Vidal once said “I told you so” are the four most beautiful words in the English language.

    Perhaps this is why it’s difficult to resist sharing new data that show how Sweden’s much-maligned pandemic response was right after all.

    For those who’ve forgotten, Sweden was excoriated by corporate media and US politicians for its lighter-touch Covid-19 strategy. Many were downright hostile to the Swedes for refusing to shutter schools, lock down businesses, and ramp up police to enforce mandates.

    Here’s a sample of headlines:

    • “Why the Swedish Model for Fighting COVID-19 Is a Disaster” (Time, October 2020).

    • “The Inside Story of How Sweden Botched Its Coronavirus Response” (Foreign Policy, December 2020).

    • “Sweden Stayed Open and More People Died of Covid-19, but the Real Reason May Be Something Darker” (Forbes, 2020).

    • “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” (New York Times, July 2020).

    • “I Just Came Home to Sweden. I’m Horrified by the Coronavirus Response Here” (Slate, April 2020).

    This is just a taste of the reactions against Sweden in 2020. By opting to allow its 10 million citizens to continue living relatively normal lives, Sweden was, in the words of The Guardian, leading not just Swedes but the entire world “to catastrophe.”

    Even then-president Trump got in on the action of smacking Sweden around.

    “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown,” the tweeter-in-chief warned.

    Despite the foreboding rhetoric, the worst-case predictions for Sweden never materialized. In fact, they were not even close.

    In March 2021, it was apparent that Sweden had a lower mortality rate than most European nations. The following year, Sweden boasted one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe.

    By March 2023, Sweden had the lowest excess death rate in all of Europe, according to some data sets. And though some weren’t ready to admit that Sweden had the lowest excess mortality in all of Europe, even the New York Times, which had mocked Sweden’s pandemic strategy, conceded that the nation’s laissez-faire approach was hardly the disaster many had predicted.

    More recently, Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg shared a statistical analysis based on government data from all European countries from January 2020 to August 2022. The study demonstrated that Sweden had the lowest cumulative age-standardized mortality rate in all of Europe in that period.

    “Across Europe, Sweden saw [the] lowest total death during and after Covid,” Lomborg said on X (formerly Twitter).

    Lomborg’s analysis provides yet more evidence that the Covid state was a disaster.

    Some will say, How could we have known?

    The harsh truth is that some of us did know. In March 2020, I warned that government “cures” for Covid-19 were likely to be worse than the disease itself. The following month, I argued that Sweden’s laissez-faire policy was likely to be a more effective policy than the hardline approach favored by other nations.

    I wrote these things not because I’m a prophet, but because I’ve read a bit of history and understand basic economics.

    History shows that collective responses during panics tend not to end well, and economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan explained why near the beginning of the pandemic.

    “In times of crisis, people want someone to do something, and don’t want to hear about tradeoffs,” the authors noted. “This is the breeding ground for grand policies driven by the mantra, ‘if it saves just one life.’”

    The thing is, tradeoffs are real. Indeed, economics is largely a study of them. When you choose one thing, you give up another; and we evaluate outcomes based on what we get versus what we gave up. We call this opportunity cost.

    Throughout most of the pandemic, however, there were those who didn’t want to pay any attention to opportunity costs or the unintended consequences of government lockdowns—and they were legion.

    This is the great economic fallacy Henry Hazlitt warned of decades ago.

    Hazlitt, the author of Economics in One Lesson, claimed that overlooking the secondary consequences of policies accounted for “nine-tenths” of the economic fallacies in the world.

    “[There is] a persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy,” he wrote, “and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be.”

    This was the fatal flaw—quite literally—of the Covid state. Its engineers didn’t realize they were not saving lives, but trading lives (to borrow a turn of phrase from Harrigan and Davies).

    Lockdowns weren’t scientific and proved ineffective at slowing the spread of Covid, but even if they had worked, they came with severe collateral damage: cancer screenings plummeted, drug use surged, learning was lost, and global poverty exploded. Depression and unemployment skyrocketed, businesses went bankrupt, and high inflation arrived. Babies were denied heart surgery because of travel restrictions, youth suicides increased…the list goes on and on.

    The dark truth is that lockdowns were not based on science and came with a rather unfortunate side effect: they killed people.

    The secondary consequences of lockdowns and other non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) did irreparable harm to humans that will be experienced for decades to come.

    In the words of New York magazine, lockdowns were “a giant experiment” that failed.

    Sweden’s top infectious disease expert, Anders Tegnell, was one of the few people to understand that lockdowns would probably not work. And though Tegnell is not a professional economist, he seemed to understand the lesson of secondary consequences better than many economists.

    “The effects of different strategies, lockdowns, and other measures, are much more complex than we understand today,” he told Reuters in 2020, when his strategy was under fire.

    By understanding this basic economic principle and having the courage to stand by his convictions, Tegnell was able to avoid the pernicious effects of lockdowns, a policy that seduced so many central planners.

    Today, many more people in Sweden are alive because of it. And Anders Tegnell should not be shy in saying, “I told you so.”


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at FEE.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The New York Times’ Stunning Confession on Sweden’s Pandemic Response

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times published an article that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

    “How Did No-Mandate Sweden End Up With Such an Average Pandemic?” the headline asked.

    Times writer David Wallace-Wells doesn’t accept claims that Sweden—which drew intense criticism for refusing to go into lockdown in 2020—had the lowest excess death rate in Europe, with just 3.3 percent more deaths than expected, the lowest percentage among OECD countries. But he does concede that “it’s hard to argue on the basis of Sweden’s epidemiological experience that its policy course was a disastrous one.”

    This might not sound like much of a concession, but it is.

    The Grey Lady reported in 2020 that “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” for its Covid response, and the Times was joined by a chorus of media outlets (and President Donald Trump) who alleged Sweden had “botched the pandemic” and amplified the virus.

    Today we know this was not the case. And though Wallace-Wells seems to begrudge Anders Tegnell—the architect of Sweden’s policy—taking a “victory lap through the media,” it’s worth pointing out that the epidemiologist received death threats for his pandemic response, which looks better with each passing week.

    Just how successful Sweden’s approach was is still subject to debate. While Wallace-Wells is skeptical of Swedish claims that the country had the lowest excess mortality in Europe—he says the data set is imperfect and is not adjusted for demographics—it’s clear Sweden performed better than many lockdown nations. World Health Organization data he references show Swedes had an excess death rate average of 56/100,000—far better than Italy (133), Germany (116), Spain (111), and the UK (109).

    Whatever data one chooses, one fact is undebatable: this is not what modelers predicted.

    It’s important to remember that one of the reasons nations went into lockdown in the first place was that the Imperial College of London predicted as many as 40 million people would die in nine months if the virus was left unchecked. Those same modelers predicted that Sweden would suffer 96,000 deaths by July 2020 if the nation didn’t close.

    That didn’t happen. (The actual death count by July 2020 was 5,700.)

    So whether one accepts claims that Sweden had the lowest excess death toll in Europe or merely performed “average,” it’s clear modelers were horribly wrong.

    While Wallace-Wells doesn’t address these modeling errors, he does highlight the ineffectiveness of government regulations, conceding that “mandates may matter somewhat less than social behavior and the disease itself — and surely less than we want to believe.”

    People will continue to debate mandates, of course. They’ll point out that countries like Finland and Norway had lower Covid mortality than Sweden, ignoring that (as Wallace-Wells also notes) these countries actually had policies less stringent than Sweden for much of 2020, according to Oxford’s Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. (Neighbors were apparently quick to adopt Sweden’s “lighter touch” approach.)

    This does not mean we don’t have clear answers, however. Early in the pandemic, I asked a proactive question: “could Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus actually work?”

    Though Wallace-Wells never quite says yes, he includes a telling quote from Francois Balloux, the director of the UCL Genetics Institute and a professor of computational biology at University College London.

    “What the ‘Swedish model’ really suggests is that pandemic mitigation measures can be effectively deployed in a respectful, largely non-coercive way,” writes Balloux.

    This is as close to an admission of “Sorry, we were wrong” as we’re likely to see in the New York Times.

    After all, the non-coercive measures Balloux mentions are precisely what proponents of Sweden’s approach, including signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, had advocated all along. (Wallace-Welles is correct when he notes that Sweden never adopted a “let it rip” approach, as many claim.)

    Sadly, most countries instead adopted highly-coercive measures, even tyrannical ones, believing they had the knowledge to plan society. In doing so, they ignored the warning of Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek, who cautioned that “if man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of events possible.”

    This is the biggest lesson of the pandemic: Central planners do not possess the knowledge to effectively organize society, but they do possess the power to wreck the social order—quickly. This is precisely why Hayek said it was imperative that those with power approach society with humility.

    Some people appear to have learned this lesson. Wallace-Wells said it’s “humbling to acknowledge” that mandates simply were unable to do what many believed they could.

    Let’s hope others learn this lesson as well—and offer the Swedes and Dr. Tegnell a well-deserved apology.

    This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • How Finland and Norway Proved Sweden’s Approach to COVID-19 Works

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The coronavirus is back in force. Many nations around the world are seeing alarming rises in cases and deaths, totals that in many instances exceed the highs reached in March, April, and May.

    From the beginning of the pandemic, governments around the world have tried to tame the virus. All have failed, to varying degrees.

    Whether governments implement draconian lockdowns, modest lockdowns, or no lockdowns at all, the virus has spread. Some countries with harsh lockdowns have fared better; many have fared worse. As some have pointed out, the virus doesn’t seem to care what policies you put in place.

    Belgium, for example, has the second highest COVID-19 death rate in the world even though it implemented one of the strictest lockdowns in the world (81.5 stringency). Italy and Spain had even harsher lockdowns, and both countries are also among the most devastated by the virus. (Italy’s current death rate is lower than that of Belgium and Spain, but the country is facing a resurgence of the virus that looks positively frightening.)

    We can measure lockdown stringency because of a feature created by Our World in Data, a research team based at the University of Oxford that produces information in all sorts of wonderful charts and graphs.

    While most of the world went into lockdown in March, Swedish officials chose to forgo a full lockdown, opting instead for a “lighter touch” approach that relied on cooperation with citizens, who were given public health information and encouraged to behave responsibly.

    Our World in Data shows Sweden’s government response stringency never reached 50, peaking at about 46 from late April to early June.  (As a point of reference, the US averaged a stringency of about 70 from March to September.) This is well below the top stringency of Spain (85) and Italy (94). 

    Yet, Sweden’s per capita death rate is lower than Spain, Belgium, Italy and other nations despite the fact that it did not initiate a lockdown. As a result, Sweden’s economy was spared much of the damage these nations suffered (though not all).

    Despite the apparent success of Sweden’s strategy, the Swedes have found themselves attacked. The New York Times has described Sweden’s policy as a “cautionary tale,” while other media outlets have used it as an illustration of how not to handle the coronavirus.

    Critics of Sweden’s policy point out that although Sweden has experienced fewer deaths than many European nations, it has suffered more than its Nordic neighbors, Finland and Norway.

    This is true, but it needs to be contextualized.

    Norway and Finland have some of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the world, with 54 deaths per one million citizens and 66 per million respectively. This is well below the median in Europe (240 per million) and Sweden’s rate (605 per million).

    What these critics fail to realize is that both Finland and Norway have had less restrictive policies than Sweden for the bulk of the pandemic—not more lockdowns.

    Norway’s lockdown stringency has been less than 40 since early June, and fell all the way to 28.7 in September and October. Finland’s lockdown stringency followed a similar pattern, floating around the mid to low 30s for most of the second half of the year, before creeping back up to 41 around Halloween.

    When people compare Sweden unfavorably to Finland and Norway to dismiss its laissez-faire policy, they are drawing the opposite conclusion from what the data point really reveals. Yes, Finland and Norway have lower deaths than Sweden—but they have actually been more laissez-faire than their neighbor for the majority of the pandemic.

    Since June, Finland and Norway have had less restrictive government policies than Sweden, and both nations have endured the coronavirus remarkably well. They have been among the freest nations in the world since early June, and COVID-19 deaths have been miniscule.

    Neither country even has a mask mandate, though both implemented mask recommendations in August. In Norway, private gatherings in public places are still permitted, though the capacity was recently reduced to 50 people (down from 200).

    In Finland, people say daily life hasn’t changed very much.

    “My daily life actually hasn’t been affected too much,” healthcare assistant Gegi Aydin told one local news station.

    The lighter touch approach can be seen in their economies, as well. In the second quarter of 2020, Norway and Finland saw their economies contract by 6.3 percent and 6.4 percent respectively. That’s about half the 11.8 percent drop of the European Union, and well below that experienced by Spain (-18.5%) and the United Kingdom (-19.1%). It’s even lower than that of Sweden, which saw a decline of 8.6 percent.

    Despite their low lockdown stringency, Norway and Finland are among the only places in Europe you’ll find considered safe for travel.

    As I’ve pointed out before, people aren’t attacking the results of Sweden’s policies. They are attacking the nature of its policies. Of course, there are many nations that have been hit much harder than Sweden. But these nations are ignored because they don’t threaten the narrative that government lockdowns work, and that millions more would have died without them.

    Norway and Finland show that the coronavirus doesn’t care about government policy. Their numbers have remained low with moderately strict lockdowns and with laissez-faire policies. 

    With the coronavirus resurging around the world, there is talk of implementing another round of crippling lockdowns. World leaders are facing immense pressure to “do something.”

    This would be a mistake. Lockdowns come with severe and deadly unintended consequences. Moreover, they have proven utterly ineffective at taming the virus—which is why the World Health Organization is now advising against their use.

    The reality is, humans are unwilling to accept how powerless they are to stop this virus. They are unwilling to admit they cannot control it.

    Decades ago, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the economist F.A. Hayek warned of the dangers of such hubris. If man continued to live in ignorance of the limits of his knowledge, it would breed a “fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization…”

    It’s a lesson that has never been more important. We’ll soon know if it’s one we’re finally prepared to learn.

    Jon Miltimore


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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