Dear CNN: Commission Finds Sweden’s No Lockdown Policy Was Broadly Correct — Is THAT News?

Do you remember when pundits and “experts” mocked Sweden for being the lone country in the world to not follow China’s lead with lockdowns? Well, it looks like they were right.

Some “experts” in the Anglosphere are making the absurd assertion that Western democracies didn’t lockdown hard enough. The “lockdown harder” model appeared to be the one preferred by the COVIDictators in Australia which spawned many jokes that the island nation had hearkened back to its roots as a penal colony.

While some countries introduced vaccine passports and mask mandates, Sweden bucked the trend and chose to prioritize individual liberty.

Recently, a commission examining Sweden’s no lockdown strategy found that the country’s response was largely correct.

Sweden polarized opinion at home and abroad with its handling of the pandemic, opting against the lockdowns implemented by many countries and adopting a largely voluntary approach of promoting social distancing and good hygiene.

The commission — set up by the government under pressure from parliament — said Sweden’s broad policy was “fundamentally correct.”

“It meant that citizens retained more of their personal freedom than in many other countries,” the report says.

Shockingly, the media outlet cited here is Canada’s state media corporation, the CBC. Canada has implemented some of the most stringent lockdown strategies in the world and continues to discriminate against unvaccinated citizens preventing them from air, train, or boat travel out of the country or inter-provincially. This medical segregation is what sparked the trucker protest that lasted 3 weeks in Ottawa in early February.

Of course, it adds that the commission found that Sweden did make some mistakes — suggesting capacity limits should have been adopted earlier on and that the government’s response was sometimes “slow” or “confused.”

It also says that the government should have pushed for “more rigorous and intrusive disease prevention and control measures” like masks in public settings.

But all of this criticism was based on just the first few weeks of the pandemic — all the way back in March 2022, when we didn’t know much about the virus as we do now. The government of Sweden, however, learned and adjusted its policies to accommodate for what we continued to learn about the pandemic.

Here’s a U.K. report on Sweden’s “no-lockdown” policy from April 2020:

Despite the nay-sayers at the CBC — which, you will recall is heavily subsidized by the Canadian government, so they have a particular pro-lockdown agenda to push here — the data shows that Sweden didn’t do as poorly as some of their neighbors that did opt for lockdowns.

Crucially, the excess death rate in Sweden is one of the lowest in Europe.

And in stark contrast to teachers’ union advocacy for schools to be shut in North America “until it’s safe”, Sweden’s preschools and elementary schools were kept open throughout the pandemic and were not a significant driver of community spread.

Figures from statistics agency Eurostat showed the country had 7.7 per cent more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years, among the lowest excess mortality rates in Europe…

“In the light of current knowledge … the Commission is not convinced that extended or recurring mandatory lockdowns, as introduced in other countries, are a necessary element in the response to a new, serious epidemic outbreak.”

Moreover, the report argues the “right balance” was struck in terms of the education sector. Preschool and elementary schools were kept open, with universities and the equivalent of high schools switched to remote learning.

Unlike the rest of the world, Sweden didn’t just keep doing the same thing over and over hoping to get a different result. They were flexible and addressed what was happening in their own borders rather than locking down prematurely and hoping for the unattainable “COVID Zero” approach taken by New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.

Sweden made some adjustments in early January to its approach in light of the Omicron variant’s sweep across much of the world, but earlier this month said they were no longer needed. Restaurants and bars are now open, with no time or capacity limits.

The country’s health agency said it was scrapping large-scale testing, as it was deemed too expensive in relation to the benefits. Sweden spent the equivalent of about $67 million Cdn per week on testing for the first five weeks of this year and around $3 billion since the start of the pandemic.
Source: CBC News (Emphasis Added

So, sure. Sweden might have made some mistakes in the first few weeks. What country didn’t? But they did the one thing that Western democracies are supposed to do — prioritized the freedom of the individual.

Once a government is content with usurping individual liberty for what they deem is the “greater good”, it’s quite the fight to get that freedom back.

The United States became a nation by choosing liberty over tyranny. It would be nice if some American politicians remembered that.

You can read the full report on Sweden’s no lockdown strategy here.

It’s no secret that people are cowering with fear these days. But those of us with faith know that living your life in fear is crap. Let’s get that message out there.

We’re living in a time where fear is running rampant and unchecked.

It seems like most public policy is based on fear these days, especially when it comes to the Wuhan Virus.

2 Timothy 1:7 says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”

It seems that a LOT of people have completely forgotten that message.

Let’s give them a reminder…