Covid lockdowns: We must not forgive, we must not forget
The lockdown policies implemented during the covid âpandemicâ were disastrous. These policies should have been examined for their effectiveness. Yet, little interest has been shown in doing so.
In the following, Ian Miller highlights a study to compare Swedenâs light-touch approach to the heavy-handed approach taken by other European governments.
â is a clear repudiation of the lockdown model,â he writes. âWhich is precisely why Swedenâs example is deliberately being ignored today.â
The Lockdown Disaster Must Not Be Forgiven: Massive European Study Vindicates Swedenâs Common-Sense Pandemic Response
By Ian Miller, as published by Brownstone Institute
Weâre now rapidly approaching the six-year anniversary of â15 Days to Slow the Spread.â
That policy has to have been one of the most disastrous in world history, created by âexpertsâ who took all established pre-pandemic planning documents and tossed them out the window at the first opportunity.
It was a policy based on inaccurate reports out of China, which claimed that their lockdowns effectively stamped out transmission of covid-19 within a matter of days.
It was a policy that ignored solid research - from established epidemiologists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya - which found that the coronavirus had already spread much more widely than previously realised.
It must be noted forever that lockdowns and the associated mask mandates, vaccine passports and school closures continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of those wretched policies will be quite literally endless. Itâs not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies and responses have quite literally changed the course of world history.
One would think that there would definitely be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools was necessary to save lives.
Yet six years later, thereâs unfortunately very little interest in examining those questions. And when you understand the data from Sweden, you will see exactly why.
Study on Swedish Approach to Covid Shows Lockdowns Didnât Work
A study published in PubMed examined the Swedish approach to covid policy, relative to its European counterparts, primarily because Sweden did not rely on lockdowns in response to the pandemic, but instead used âvoluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations,â the study says.
Despite a âmajority of Swedesâ supporting those policies, âthis approach faced rapid and continuous criticism.â
That criticism came primarily from public health figures such as, surprise, surprise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who criticised Sweden repeatedly for going against the herd.
âYouâve compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences,â he said during a Senate Committee hearing in September 2020. âBut compare Swedenâs death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. Itâs worse. So, I donât think itâs appropriate to compare Sweden with us.â
âIf you look at Sweden, they are in some trouble,â Fauci claimed on Good Morning America in late 2020. âThey are starting to see that their death rate is much higher than the surrounding countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland ⌠Theyâre starting to see now that theyâre having to rethink some of the things they did.â
This was, of course, not true. They did not ârethinkâ their strategy of light-touch recommendations over lockdowns. And comparing Sweden exclusively to its neighbours is an absurd misdirection that no other country was subjected to. But Fauci, obviously never one for honesty or intellectual integrity, represented many public health figures who were anxious to see Sweden fail.
Yet as this research shows, reality was precisely the opposite.
The study explains that Sweden received criticism for ânot legally enforcing mask-wearing in public spaces,â as well as keeping schools open and âbeing too permissiveâ with its policies. All the things that we were told were necessary to stop covid and save lives. The researchers tested these statements using excess mortality data and stringency indices to compare Sweden across the whole of Europe, not just its neighbours.
They chose excess mortality because, unlike covid-specific measurements, itâs less subject to bias, differences in testing, and counting, and individual definitions of covid-caused outcomes. It also accounts for deaths that âcould potentially be indirectly attributed to the negative effects of strict lockdown measures and the overall strain on healthcare systems, leading to reduced access to healthcare for other diseases, among other factors.â
Turns out that what they discovered was that Sweden vastly outperformed the rest of Europe from 2020-2022, with outcomes that were remarkably similar to the other Nordic countries.
âAmong 42 European countries, the cumulative excess all-cause mortality from January 2020 to December 2022 ranged from 46 (Luxembourg) to 1,080 (Bulgaria) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with a median of 351/100,000,â they write. âIn Sweden, the excess mortality rate of 158/100,000 was among the lowest, ranked 37th among 42 countries, and not very different from other Nordic countries: Norway (129), Denmark (97), and Finland (228).â
BjĂśrkman A, GisslĂŠn M, Gullberg M, Ludvigsson J. The Swedish COVID-19 approach: a scientific dialogue on mitigation policies. Front Public Health. 2023 Jul 20;11:1206732. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1206732. PMID: 37546333; PMCID: PMC10399217.
So why did Sweden underperform in 2020 relative to its neighbours? Likely due, as the study explains, to âmortality displacement due to low all-cause mortality in 2019,â as well as âpoorly organised older adult care structures.â
What does this mean? Essentially, there were significantly fewer deaths from all causes in Sweden in 2019, meaning there were more extremely elderly people alive in 2020 who were susceptible to severe outcomes from covid. This is reflected in the massive age gradient with covid-associated deaths. In Sweden, â~40% of the covid-19-associated deaths were among patients in nursing homes,â the study says, âand 67% of all covid-19 deaths were among individuals above 80 years of age, representing 10% of all deaths in that age group.â
For younger age groups, covid was mostly a non-issue. âcovid-19 deaths below 50 years of age represented only 1.2% of all covid deaths, including 21 individuals below 20 years of age, mostly with underlying co-morbidities, representing 1% of all deaths in that age group.â
Effectively, covid ravaged extremely elderly people, while those under 50, despite the lack of mask mandates and lockdowns, saw very limited impact.
Swedenâs Lack of Lockdowns Led to Better Outcomes
Equally important, they examined the âstringency indexâ for countries across Europe, then made a data table comparing that stringency to excess mortality from 2020-2022. Effectively, how strict were a countryâs policies, and how much did that matter to reducing excess mortality?
Turns out, thereâs a definitive, resounding answer which this chart demonstrates perfectly. Countries are plotted based on their stringency index, the x-axis, and excess mortality, the y-axis. The line demonstrates the trend in mortality rates, and thereâs virtually no relationship between the severity of policy and preventing excess mortality.
The R-squared, effectively the relationship between stringency index and excess mortality, is just 0.14. The closer to 1, the more related stringency is to outcomes. This is 0.14.
Countries like Italy and Spain were some of the strictest when it came to lockdowns and mandates, yet ranked near the top in excess mortality rates. The UK, Portugal, the Netherlands and others were significantly more stringent and also had demonstrably worse outcomes. Denmark was the second least strict country and had the best outcomes, at least in this examination.
What does this tell us? Well, put simply, Fauci was wrong. Sweden did not underperform relative to its neighbours. It did significantly better than the rest of Europe and, of course, the United States. Lockdowns and stringency were not related, whatsoever, to reducing excess mortality. They never mandated masks, one of his chief policy recommendations, and outperformed other countries like Germany, which imposed N95-level mandates for months on end.
This is a clear repudiation of the lockdown model. Which is precisely why Swedenâs example is deliberately being ignored today. Because learning the actual results of these historically bad policies requires humility, accountability and honesty, all qualities that many in public health are truly incapable of possessing.
About the Author
Ian Miller is the author of âUnmasked: The Global Failure of covid Mask Mandatesâ. His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best-selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack page titled âUnmaskedâ.














