Matt Ridley (Science writer/journalist) has exposed the futility of lockdowns in combatting Covid-19 in a recent Telegraph article. His article exposes the smug over-confidence of the promoters of lockdowns.
Excess mortality is the only true measure of the impact of an epidemic, as the 19th-century epidemiologist William Farr insisted: “The death rate is a fact; all else is inference.” And lockdowns cause excess mortality outside the virus itself: from untreated cancer and heart disease, from suicide and mental illness. If you look at excess mortality over the past three years, on most data sets one of the countries with the lowest overall mortality increases is Sweden, the only country that stood against the herd and refused to implement widespread compulsory lockdowns or close schools.
Over the period from March 2020 to June 2022, Sweden’s cumulative, all-cause excess mortality was not much higher than that of its Nordic neighbours and significantly lower than that of most other countries.
Those who argued that Sweden was being sensible in relying mostly on voluntary measures were routinely vilified during the pandemic. We know with certainty that the Swedish model has failed, wrote Peter Geoghegan in The Guardian a year ago. Swedes are different, we were told: they live in the forest (no they don’t: the country is more urbanised than the UK); are more socially responsible (cultural stereotypes, anyone?); can be compared only with Danes and Norwegians.
In his fine book The Herd, the Swedish journalist Johan Anderberg has chronicled the development of the Swedish policy and how tough it was for its architect, Anders Tegnell, to stay the course as country after country was stampeded into compulsory and comprehensive lockdowns. “Shutting down society completely won’t work,” said Tegnell on March 12 2020, while watching with admiration Boris Johnson preach the same message. He was devastated when Britain about-turned 10 days later, leaving Sweden alone to be the world’s control experiment.
The Telegraph
We are starting to see the grim reality of our own lockdowns. Excess mortality is spiking now as those who couldn’t get treatment during repeated lockdowns now suffer the reality of Jacinda Ardern’s “kindness”.
To my shame, I was not a lockdown sceptic from the start. But when lockdowns kept happening and failing, my doubts grew. Being preached at by the mainstream media that protests against racism in 2020 were not super-spreader events but family funerals or protests against lockdowns were – that stuck in my craw.
Then, in December 2021, came the final proof that the lockdown fanatics were wrong. The science establishment tried to bounce Boris Johnson into a Christmas lockdown to prevent the omicron wave. Ignoring evidence that omicron was mild – and not just because many people had been vaccinated – they produced models showing a range of possible outcomes: very high to massively high death rates if we did not lock down.
Egged on by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Boris called their bluff and refused to cancel Christmas. As Fraser Nelson has chronicled in The Spectator, deaths and hospitalisations never reached a small fraction of even their lowest predicted levels. That emperor had no clothes.
The emperor never had any clothes. The models were all wrong, yet Ardern’s Labour Government used the same flawed models and is still using them despite the models being wrong in every material way.
The lockdowns only ever succeeded in one thing: kicking the can down the road to cover for poor decision-making by those who are all patting themselves on the back.
The lockdowns were just one part of the awful and divisive tactics used by many governments around the world. It was all utterly pointless and shows the hubris of political leaders that thought they could out-wit, out-play and out-think a virus which at the end of the day has proven to be nowhere near as lethal as predicted.
Instead of fessing up and admitting they over-reacted, they’ve doubled down. What is worse is that we are now heading into the tragedy, and it will be a tragedy, that enforced vaccinations of experimental therapies backed by lying Big Pharma delivered to people who were brainwashed into believing that they were “doing the right thing”.
When doing the right thing ends up killing you, and those who did the “wrong thing” by refusing the vaccines aren’t getting sick or dying from Covid or anything else, surely people are going to get angry. Sadly, I think that will take some time.
Meanwhile, get used to headlines of fit and healthy people dying suddenly, and supposedly rare cancers and illnesses taking others including children. Eventually the penny will drop. But the sad reality is you can’t unvaccinate yourself, and you can’t repair your destroyed immune system as a result of those vaccines that were supposed to save you all.
2023 may well end up being the year of “I told you so”.
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