Perhaps the biggest example of the Western media's inherent biases surrounding its coverage of Sweden's approach to tackling COVID-19. Plenty of media outlets decried the country's "massive" fatality rate compared to its lockdown-favoring neighbors, but failed to add the context necessary to see that the difference was only a couple thousand deaths, and that Sweden's per capita mortality rate was still lower than Britain's, and other countries that favored lockdowns.
When Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden's strategy, said during an interview that he would have done things "differently" if given a second chance, the Western press, including the NYT, rushed to frame this as an admission of guilt for failing to order the types of restrictive lockdowns seen in other European countries. Tegnell later clarified that this isn't what he meant at all.
What's more, in Sweden, deaths have declined nearly to zero. And since the country's economy has remained open this whole time, there's little risk of resurgence when whatever minimal restrictions are still in place are finally lifted.
In a column published Thursday, The Telegraph's Allister Heath argued that Sweden's success at fighting the virus while minimizing economic damage elucidates the depth of the British medical establishment's incompetence, as it was Britain's health experts whose advice PM Johnson assiduously followed.
Read an excerpt from the column below (courtesy of the Telegraph):
So now we know: Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.
Our arrogant quangocrats and state “experts” should hang their heads in shame: their reaction to coronavirus was one of the greatest public policy blunders in modern history, more severe even than Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Suez or the ERM fiasco.
Millions will lose their jobs when furlough ends; tens of thousands of small businesses are failing; schooling is in chaos, with A-level grades all over the place; vast numbers are likely to die from untreated or undetected illnesses; and we have seen the first exodus of foreigners in years, with the labour market survey suggesting a decline in non-UK born adults.
But if a drop in GDP is unavoidable, governments can influence its size and scale. Politicians can react in one of three ways to a pandemic. They can do nothing, and allow the disease to rip until herd immunity is reached. Quite rightly, no government has pursued this policy, out of fear of mass deaths and total social and economic collapse.
The second approach involves imposing proportionate restrictions to facilitate social distancing, banning certain sorts of gatherings while encouraging and informing the public. The Swedes pursued a version of this centrist strategy: there was a fair bit of compulsion, but also a focus on retaining normal life and keeping schools open. The virus was taken very seriously, but there was no formal lockdown. Tegnell is one of the few genuine heroes of this crisis: he identified the correct trade-offs.
The third option is the full-on statist approach, which imposes a legally binding lockdown and shuts down society. Such a blunderbuss approach may be right under certain circumstances – if a vaccine is imminent – or for some viruses – for example, if we are ever hit with one that targets children and comes with a much higher fatality rate – but the latest economic and mortality statistics suggest this wasn’t so for Covid-19.
Almost all economists thought that Sweden’s economy would suffer hugely from its idiosyncratic strategy. They were wrong. Sweden’s GDP fell by just 8.6 per cent in the first half of the year, all in the second quarter, and its excess deaths jumped 24 per cent. A big part of Sweden’s recession was caused by a slump in demand for its exports from its fully locked-down neighbours. One could speculate that had all countries pursued a Swedish-style strategy, the economic hit could have been worth no more than 3-4 per cent of GDP. That could be seen as the core cost of the virus under a sensible policy reaction.
By contrast, Britain’s economy slumped by 22.2 per cent in the first half of the year, a performance almost three times as bad as Sweden’s, and its excess deaths shot up by 45 per cent. Spain’s national income slumped even more (22.7 per cent), and France’s (down 18.9 per cent) and Italy’s (down 17.1 per cent) slightly less, but all three also suffered far greater per capita excess deaths than Sweden. The Swedes allowed the virus to spread in care homes, so if that major failure had been fixed, their death rate could have been a lot lower still.
Lockdown Restrictions Are A Test To See How Much Tyranny Americans Will Accept
Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
There are multiple aspects to the global pandemic which seem engineered to push our society to make “sacrificial decisions”. We can choose to sacrifice the lives of those that are susceptible to the virus, sacrifice our economy, or sacrifice many of our freedoms with the promise that the economy and lives will be protected. The easiest choice is always to give away a little more freedom. We'll get it all back eventually...right?
Of course, we don't actually get to “choose” anything when we play along with this game. 4th Gen warfare is meant to eventually take IT ALL from the target population while making people think it was their choice to give those things away.
To be clear, it's not only the pandemic being exploited as leverage to conjure these situations. The leftist riots are another example of a bought and paid for crisis that is being used in an attempt to convince half of Americans that breaking constitutional principles and instituting unprecedented government power is somehow an acceptable sacrifice. The riots and the virus response work hand-in-hand; one is created to get leftists to demand totalitarianism in the name of public safety, the other is created to get conservatives to demand totalitarianism in the name of public safety.
The solution always ends up being totalitarian government.
There are those that would have you believe that this is the only way. The new propaganda meme out there is:
“Silly libertarians live in a fantasy world where freedom is valued over security in times of crisis. We don't have the luxury of freedom when communist terrorists/deadly virus threaten to destroy the fabric of our society...”
Sound familiar? Yes, this nonsense narrative is everywhere on forums and message boards these days, almost as if someone was paying people to inject it into everyday discussion. The problem is, I've seen this all before. Right after the events of 9/11, America went insane for at least a few years, hyperfocused on the threat of terrorists while ignoring the greater root danger of all powerful government. The number of constitutional protections being violated in the name of “beating the terrorists” was staggering, and the number of mostly conservative citizens cheering for this at the time was immense.
Today's calls for overreaching government power in the name of “beating coronavirus” or “beating the extreme left” are no different. In the wake of widespread fear, people suffer from fits of temporary madness that allows them rationalize moral relativism and unnecessary sacrifices.
I've never really understood that aspect of behavior among certain groups. I've never been so fearful of losing my life that I was willing to hand over anything including my freedom and my future on the mere chance that I could stay alive just a little longer. But for some, that fear dominates their every waking moment.
To me, this would be a torturous and empty existence. What do these people have to live for anyway? Obviously they don't care about their children because they are willing to give away their children's future just so they can feel safer today. Do they have some kind of epic contribution for the good of humanity and they feel they must do anything to survive long enough to make it happen? Are they working on the cure for cancer or a path to world peace? I doubt it.
The question I almost never see asked in the mainstream when it comes to the pandemic is this – Is it really all worth it?
Is it worth it to shut down large swaths of the US economy, threatening millions of jobs, sending millions of people into poverty, risking speedy financial collapse and degrading our fundamental freedoms just to save .03% of the population? What if it was 1% of the population? Would it be worth it then? What about 3%?
The reality is, it's NEVER worth it.
Another lie is that we can somehow avoid or escape the virus. Eventually, almost everyone is going to get it, it's just a matter of time.Hope that a working vaccine can be developed in less than a year is deluded, and given the terrible results of previous attempts by governments to rush vaccines into production, I think I would rather take my chances with Covid. Even medical tyrant Dr. Fauci himself admits that a vaccine will not be fully effective and that the virus may be around for many years to come.
So, why are we beating around the bush? Why are we shutting down the economy? Why are we giving up our everyday freedoms? Who are we saving? No one. The people that are going to die from coronavirus are going to die from it sooner or later. If we are going to get into a discussion on the so-called “greater good”, then let's really be logical about it. The decision is not all that hard when you set aside the propaganda and think about it.
More...
No comments:
Post a Comment