Non-Tyrannical Lockdown & Mask Laws Sweden removes most COVID Restrictions despite about 30% of "Swedes Aged 16 and above are [not being] fully Vaccinated"
On September 7, Reuter reported that the non-tyrannical mask and lockdown law Sweden is removing most of the COVID restrictions despite about 30% of "Swedes aged 16 and above... [not being] fully Vaccinated":
Sweden will push ahead with easing COVID-19 restrictions at the end of this month, removing most curbs and limits on public venues such as restaurants, theatres and stadiums, the government said on Tuesday...
... About 70% of Swedes aged 16 and above are fully vaccinated. [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-remove-most-remaining-pandemic-restrictions-this-month-2021-09-07/]
Were there scientific reasons why Sweden didn't have totalitarian lockdowns or mandate tyrannical mask wearing laws?
Might the hidden agenda for the lockdowns be not just to promote
government tyranny, but to kill more people by not allowing herd
immunity so that in the Fall and Winter when all viruses return for a
second wave that more people can die to promote more tyranny?
Is the United States lockdown about Americans not getting mass
immunity from the virus as Sweden, Korea, Singapore, and Japan have
apparently done by NOT HAVING LOCKDOWNS so more people can die to keep
in place the tyranny?
UnHerd presented evidence that the lockdowns are not allowing
most Americans to get "immunity" so that they can be largely immune to
the virus which means the lockdowns may be about killing more
Americans in the Fall and Winter. Moreover, "the [scientific] evidence base for using masks in society is
still very weak":
In just a few short months Anders Tegnell, architect of Sweden’s unique
response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has gone from unknown physician and
technocrat to a household celebrity in Sweden and in countries around
the world. He is beloved by some (people have even had tattoos
made with his face) and intensely disliked by others. Today he is
suntanned and relaxed, having just returned from his summer holiday, and
wearing an open-necked polo shirt.
After all these months, does he now think that his strategy is a
failure or a success? A bit of both, he says quickly, but emphasises
more of the latter:
“I think to a great extent it’s been a success. We are now seeing
rapidly falling cases, we have continuously had healthcare that has been
working, there have been free beds at any given time, never any
crowding in the hospitals, we have been able to keep schools open which
we think is extremely important, and society fairly open — while still
having social distancing in place in a way that means that the spread of
the disease has been limited.
The failure has of course been the death toll … that has been very
much related to the long-term care facilities in Sweden. Now that has
improved, we see a lot less cases in those facilities.”
Mortality is hardly an afterthought — so why is Sweden’s mortality
rate so high? At around 550 per million of population, it sits just
under the UK and Italy but far above neighbouring Norway and Denmark. Dr
Tegnell offers a collection of reasons: with its larger migrant
populations and dense urban areas, Sweden is actually more similar to
the Netherlands and the UK than it is to other Scandinavian countries;
he believes the Swedish counting system for deaths has been more
stringent than elsewhere; also, countries are at different points in the
epidemic cycle so it is too early to compare totals.
The one thing he doesn’t mention in this list is that Sweden,
uniquely in Europe, did not impose a mandatory lockdown at any point. Is
he really claiming that this is not even a factor?
“I am not sure that it is easy to say that lockdown would make the
difference … in many ways we have had a very stringent lockdown in
Sweden. We have cut down on movement in society quite a lot: we have
compared how much we travel in Scandinavian countries, and the decrease
in travel is the same in Sweden as in neighbouring countries … In many
ways the voluntary measures we put in place in Sweden have been just as
effective as complete lockdowns in other countries. So I don’t think
complete lockdown is the way to go for all countries … the rapidly
declining cases we see in Sweden right now is another indication that
you can get the number of cases down quite a lot in a country without
having a complete lockdown.”
I ask again: is he claiming that lockdowns make no difference?
“We don’t know. It would have made maybe some difference, we don’t
know. But on the other hand we know that lockdowns also have big other
effects on public health. We know that closing schools has a great
effect on children’s health in the short and the long term. We know that
people being out of work also produces a lot of problems in the public
health area. So we also have to look at what are the negative effect of
lockdowns, and that has not been done very much so far.”
Tegnell points out the huge differences between different areas in
Sweden — parts of the South that have had much lower Covid-19 than
Copenhagen just over the water while Stockholm has had it much worse,
despite the same lockdown policy nationwide. This he puts down to the
volume of original introduction of the disease due to international
travel:
“There seems to be a close connection to how many people introduced
the disease at the same time… The spring holidays in Sweden are spread
over four different weeks depending on different geographical regions.
Unfortunately Stockholm happened to have its spring holiday just when
there was an enormous spread of Covid-19 in Europe … so a lot of Swedes
living in the Stockholm area came back with the disease. And that
started an epidemic on a level that was much higher than the start of
the epidemic in the South of Sweden, or in Finland or in Norway.
Currently that’s to me the most likely theory – that if you have a
massive introduction, it’s going to be a disease that is very, very hard
to control.” Stockholm, in other words, was more like London or New
York than Oslo or Helsinki in terms of introduction of the virus.
He believes strongly that eradication — the zero-tolerance approach
that is increasingly winning the day in the UK and US — is not a viable
option.
“I don’t think that this is a disease that we can eradicate – not with the methods that we have right now. It might
be a disease that in the long term we can eradicate with a vaccine, but
I’m not even sure about that. If you look at comparable diseases like
the flu and other respiratory viruses we are not even close to
eradicating them despite the fact that we have a vaccine. I personally
believe that this is a disease we are going to have to learn to live
with.”
Many people feel that Anders Tegnell’s approach has been overly
laissez-faire and that even now, he should be introducing more draconian
measures. A model this week from his Health Agency suggested as many as
3000 additional deaths may be seen in Sweden in the next year —
shouldn’t he do more to stop that happening?
He insists that those projections are only models, and that he hopes
and expects to achieve a much better result. But he is also mindful of
whether these draconian measures may do more harm than good:
“Of course we are trying to keep the mortality rates as low as
possible, but at the same time we have to look at the draconian measures
you are talking about. Are they going to produce even more deaths by
other means than the disease itself? Somehow we need to have the
discussion of what we are actually trying to achieve. Is it better for
public health as a whole? Or is it trying to suppress Covid-19 as much
as possible? Because getting rid of it I don’t think is going to happen:
it happened for a short time in New Zealand and maybe Iceland and those
kind of countries might be able to keep it away, but with the global
world we have today, keeping a disease like this away has never been
possible in the past and it would be even more surprising if it were
possible in the future.”
One type of intervention that does not appear to have adverse effects
is encouraging, or mandating, the use of masks. This has become an
intensely political issue in the US and more recently in the UK.
In
Sweden mask use is minimal in almost all settings. Why is he not even
recommending use of masks?
“One reason is that the evidence base for using masks in society is
still very weak. Even if more and more countries are now enforcing them
in different ways … we haven’t seen any new evidence coming up, which is
a little bit surprising. The other reason is that everything tells us
that keeping social distance is a much better way of controlling this
disease than putting masks on people. We are worried (and we get at
least tales from other countries) that people put on masks and then they
believe they can go around in society being close to each other, even
going around in society being sick. And that, in our view, would
definitely produce higher spread than we have right now...”
... On the controversial question of immunity, he suggests that a larger
percentage of the population in Sweden is already immune than antibody
studies suggest.
“There are a number of small studies already that show that of people
who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 with PCR, not all of them develop
antibodies. On the other hand we have quite a lot of evidence that
falling ill with Covid-19 twice seems to be extremely rare… Obviously
there is also quite a big part of the population that has other kinds of
immunity and T Cell immunity is the one that is most likely.
“What we see right now is a rapid fall in the number of cases, and of
course some kind of immunity has to be involved in that as nothing else
has changed. That means that immunity affects the R value quite a lot
in Sweden today.” [https://unherd.com/2020/07/swedens-anders-tegnell-judge-me-in-a-year/]