The only fact, the only number, the only question that really matters in the debate over covid is overall mortality: Is covid killing more people than usual? The answer in Sweden is no, no, no, no—no lockdowns, no mask mandates, no forced vaccinations, and no reason to panic.

I had good reason to doubt the panic narrative from the beginning, knowing very well how both governments and the media deal with alleged emergencies, from having worked for the better part of three decades in Washington, DC, as the bureau chief of a national newspaper (Investor’s Business Daily) and as a cabinet-level speechwriter for two healthcare-providing federal departments (VA and HHS). 

But what eventually settled my beliefs about covid were data on all-cause mortality in Sweden, which anyone can download here from the Swedish agency responsible for such statistics. Sweden didn’t do lockdowns or mask mandates, yet covid made little if any difference there in 2020 and even less difference in 2021. Below you see Sweden’s all-cause mortality in 2020 as barely above 2015 and also barely above the average of 2015 through 2018. Take a look, but keep reading: 

The slight rise you see above in all-cause mortality in 2020 is partly explainable by covid but largely explainable by Sweden’s anomalously low death toll in 2019, when the angel of influenza death seems to have passed Sweden by, causing what some analysts have called “pent-up mortality”—the oldest and sickest Swedes spared in 2019 being older and sicker in 2020 and therefore more vulnerable to many things.

What if the flu had not passed Sweden by in 2019? What if Sweden’s 2019 death toll had matched its 2018 death toll, leaving fewer old and sick Swedes to die in 2020? Here’s how Sweden’s all-cause mortality trend would look then: 

Figure 2

So if 2019 had been an average year for all-cause mortality, 2020 would also have been an average year, as was 2021, with both 2020 and 2021 showing no significant impact from covid.

This all but proves that covid was never as dangerous to the general population as it was billed as being. It was certainly dangerous to the oldest and sickest among us, but we could have protected them without pretending ridiculously that everyone else faced the same risk.

No wonder the world has seen an unprecedented insurrection against the official panic narrative by tens of thousands of scholars and medical professionals, who have come together to form a dozen different organizations defending medical science and sane public health policy (not to mention the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of religion, the freedom from forced medication, and the freedom to show one’s face in public). 

To date, over 15,700 medical and health scientists and over 46,400 medical practitioners all over the world have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for the much more sensible and scientific strategy of protecting the vulnerable while allowing the overwhelming majority of people, who are not seriously threatened by covid, to live their lives as they see fit, building natural immunity in doing so. The signatories include many leading epidemiologists and public health scholars at major universities such as Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, who have unfortunately been censored by social media and ignored by mainstream media because their analyses do not support the panic.  

This has never happened before. Never have so many esteemed health experts ganged together to defend health science, and never have so many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and corporate do-gooders colluded in silencing so many esteemed health experts.