(News Punch) While the whole world went mad, closing schools, issuing mask orders and mandatory lockdowns, Sweden refused to listen to Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and kept their society open. Fast forward to the end of 2022 and the data shows that Sweden made the right call.
Sweden were the only country in the world to have faith in the immune systems and common sense of their population. Now they are being rewarded with the lowest pandemic excess mortality rate in the world.
Sweden were the only developed country to keep their head, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, while all around them were losing theirs. It’s also worth noting the statistics from Africa. Only 6% of people are vaccinated, yet the virus is nowhere to be seen and, unlike in the Western world, excess deaths are not climbing.
Back in April 2020, Stuff reported on how Sweden was resisting ferocious pressure to lockdown from the international community, Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum.
Giesecke was almost correct. But, the difference between the countries in the end was not quite small. Sweden did much, much better – ten times better than Chile, in fact, notorious for having the strictest lockdowns ‘despite’ also having one of the most ‘successful’ vaccination campaigns.
Joel Smalley reports: As of reporting date June 19th 2022, of all the countries analysed by the OECD, Sweden has the lowest overall cumulative excess deaths tally.
The somewhat less meaningful Covid death tally (per million population) does not have the same relative magnitude since different countries use different methods for recording what is and what isn’t a Covid death, on top of the fact, of course, that it’s a Pyrrhic victory to mitigate Covid deaths at the expense of higher excess non-Covid deaths. Take a look at Canada and Israel as prime examples of this – remarkably low Covid deaths relative to the rest of the world but very much in the worst half of the dataset in terms of overall excess mortality.
So, Sweden even beat neighbour Norway in the end. And, as you can see in the charts below, Norway is still heading in the wrong direction. So too are early successes, Australia and New Zealand. Their cumulative excess death tally has less Covid in it than other countries but they are getting their Covid add-ons now.
Here are the charts, plotting cumulative excess deaths vs Covid deaths. (Find the full set here.)
My analysis of each country leads me to three main conclusions.
