Remember when Sweden was going to be a COVID killing field? Sweden had no lockdowns and no mandates, including no vaccine mandate. In the first year of the pandemic, the trolls who lurk around this blog like ghouls used to send me death reports from Sweden.
Strangely I don’t get those anymore. What could be the reason?
Well, it turns out that Sweden has the virus under control, and much of the rest of Europe does not. Here are confirmed cases:
Here are confirmed deaths:
Let me posit something that might make sense: Sweden was the only country in Europe that approached the COVID pandemic the same way we have approached all pandemics for decades (until the COVID cult took over in 2020): ie, health authorities urged the most at-risk to stay home but encouraged everybody else to go about their business. This led to a large increase in cases and deaths in the short run, but the population developed herd immunity, which is playing out now in very low case and death rates.
It turns out that when it comes to COVID there really is no school like the old school.
The horrifying reports from Europe these days are all about vaccine mandates in Austria, Germany and elsewhere. You know where there is no vaccine mandate? Sweden.
So let’s compare Austria and Germany and Sweden.
This point needs to be driven home: mandates and lockdowns will not work. There is a reason that virologists and other experts have for decades now avoided such extreme measures. They don’t save lives in the long run.
What saves lives? 1)Freedom 2)health departments encouraging voluntary measures, such as protection of the most at-risk 3)a sober realization that viruses are almost impossible to eradicate, so we need to learn to live with them by promoting things like natural herd immunity.
Do you know what does not save lives? Mandates, like those in the UK, which have resulted in a huge increase in excess deaths that has health experts alarmed but mystified.
Check out this story from the Daily Telegraph in London:
Nearly 10,000 more people than usual have died in the past four months from non-Covid reasons, as experts called for an urgent government inquiry into whether the deaths were preventable. Fears are growing that NHS delays at the height of the pandemic left large numbers of people with previously treatable conditions suffering illnesses that have now become fatal.
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that England and Wales registered 20,823 more deaths than the five-year average in the past 18 weeks. Only 11,531 deaths involved Covid.
It means that 9,292 deaths – 45 per cent – were not linked to the pandemic.
I am sorry to point this out, but I warned about this a year ago on these very pages. In this post I pointed out that the anti-COVID lockdown measures would lead to additional deaths because health authorities were ignoring other preventable diseases.
Meanwhile, any thinking person who cares about the pandemic and the massive government overreaction to the pandemic must ask: what is going on in Africa? The bottom line throughout Africa is this: no real lockdowns, no real mandates, an extremely low vaccinated rate, but COVID has mostly disappeared.
But there is something “mysterious” going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the U.S., but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said.
Fewer than 6% of people in Africa are vaccinated. For months, the WHO has described Africa as “one of the least affected regions in the world” in its weekly pandemic reports.
Now before you make the same mistake as the AP and say that it is all because Africa has a younger population, I want you to consider that most of Latin America also has a younger population but some of the worst results in the world are in South American countries like Peru and Brazil.
This is not an observation that explains everything, but I will point out that most Latin American countries had massive, overbearing lockdowns, but most African countries did not. And the few countries in Latin America that did NOT have massive lockdowns — Nicaragua and Haiti — also had the best results, with almost no cases and no deaths.
It makes me weary to have to make this point, but here we go again: if the lockdowns and the mandates actually worked we would see a huge, incontrovertible correlation showing better results in the most locked down and mandated countries. And the countries, like Sweden, and most of Africa, and Nicaragua and Haiti, that did not have lockdowns and mandates would be — BY FAR — the most dangerous countries for COVID. But in fact the results show the exact opposite, ie, the safest countries are those that never locked down and/or had mandates.
So, any of you lurkers want to admit how wrong you have been about this pandemic from the beginning while somebody else (your humble blogger) has been right? Anybody? I like repentance, and all will be forgiven from my perspective.