shutdowns were a total failure
We will never know how many people are dying from covid in china. The regime will probably boil the stat books. The CEO of an asset management company in China last week shared an image of a document at a mortuary detailing the slip you must sign to have your dead relative released for cremation: “I guarantee the deceased XXX did not die of #COVID , and I will be fully responsible for any false claims.”
Nor will we ever know how many people died as a result of lockdowns during the nearly three years they were brutally imposed on the Chinese people before Xi Jinping’s sudden and humiliating reversal a few weeks ago. But those in the know believe both numbers will be in the millions. Relying on draconian lockdowns, while failing to vaccinate the elderly or to buy effective Western jabs, has almost certainly ensured that all age groups will have suffered significant excess mortality from both causes.
Excess mortality is the only true measure of the effects of an epidemic, as 19th-century epidemiologist William Farr insisted: “Mortality is a fact; everything else is inference.” And lockdowns cause excess mortality outside of the virus itself: from untreated cancer and heart disease, from suicide and mental illness. If you look at the excess mortality over the past three years, in most data sets one of the countries with the lowest overall mortality increases Sweden, the only country that stood up to the herd and refused to implement widespread mandatory lockdowns or close schools.
During the period March 2020 to June 2022, Sweden’s cumulative excess mortality from all causes was 6.7 percent according to an analysis of data published by the OECD. It is the lowest of all the 31 countries studied. In America, the corresponding excess mortality was 54.1 percent, in Great Britain 24.5 percent and in Denmark 12.9 percent. Even zero-Covid New Zealand is at 15.5 percent. Only sparsely populated Norway comes close to Sweden’s performance, with 6.9 percent.
Those who argued that Sweden was sensible relying mostly on voluntary measures was routinely tarnished during the pandemic. We know for sure that the Swedish model has failed, Peter Geoghegan wrote in The Guardian a year ago. Swedes are different, we were told: they live in the woods (no they don’t: the country is more urbanized than Britain); are more socially responsible (cultural stereotypes, anyone?); can only be compared to Danes and Norwegians (yup, done that – see above).
In his fine book The herd, the Swedish journalist Johan Anderberg has chronicled the development of Swedish politics and how tough it was for its architect, Anders Tegnell, to stay the course when country after country was stamped into mandatory and extensive shutdowns. “Shutting down society completely is not going to work,” Tegnell said on March 12, 2020, watching with admiration as Boris Johnson preached the same message. He was devastated when Britain turned around ten days later, leaving Sweden alone to be the world’s control experiment.
The UK changed course after the launch of unrealistic and oversimplified models produced by the Imperial College. The same trick was tried in Sweden by Joacim Rocklov and colleagues at Umeå University, with a version of the same Imperial models. Unlike Sir Chris Whitty, Tegnell called it a “horror scenario of no benefit to anyone”. Honorable British exceptions include the epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse, who wrote a book with the exact title The year the world went mad.
We now know – from Matt Hancock’s diaries – that one of the worst decisions, restrictions on children in schools, was driven not by any evidence that it would save lives but by a fear of being cornered by Nicola Sturgeon.
To my shame, I wasn’t a lockdown skeptic from the start. But as lockouts kept happening and failing, my doubts grew. Being preached by the mainstream media that anti-racism protests in 2020 weren’t super-spreading events but family funerals or protests against lockdowns were—it stuck in my collar.
Then, in December 2021, came the final proof that the lockdown fanatics were wrong. The scientific establishment tried 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 that showed a range of possible outcomes: very high to massively high death rates if we didn’t lock down.
Influenced by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Boris called their scam and refused to cancel Christmas. As Fraser Nelson has chronicled in The spectatordeaths and hospitalizations never reached even a small fraction of their lowest predicted levels. That emperor had no clothes.
Until 2020, lockdowns were never part of the plan to control pandemics. The reason they happened was twofold. The Internet, for the first time, allowed economies to limp along, at least for the middle class, while they were locked down. And an inordinately gullible admiration for China had spread within academia and the World Health Organization.
Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote in 2017 that, after Xi Jinping had stated that Marxism should be the foundation of a healthy China, “medicine has much to learn from Marx”. This was shortly after receiving a friendship award from the Chinese government. “China has a socialist, collective system (whatever criticisms people have),” tweeted Susan Michie, now a senior adviser to the World Health Organization, “not an individualistic, consumerist, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neoliberal economic policies. #LearntLessons .”
“I am convinced that we have a unique opportunity to consolidate a new idea of the left,” Roberto Speranza, Italy’s health minister, wrote about the decision to implement a national lockdown. “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realized we could,” says Professor Lockdown himself, Neil Ferguson of Imperial.
Where are the China worshipers now? Has The Lancet bar a leader who dismisses its admiration for one-party tyranny and criticizes the Covid failures in Beijing? I searched its website to no avail. Have The Guardian or The New York Times realized they were wrong about Sweden? Guess.