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Brownstone Institute

Sweden Did Exceptionally Well During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Peter C. GøtzschePETER C. GØTZSCHE

No wonder the news media are totally silent about the data that show that Sweden’s open society policy was what the rest of the world should have done, too. Numerous studies have shown Sweden’s excess death rate to be among the lowest in Europe during the pandemic and in several analyses, Sweden was at the bottom.

This is remarkable considering that Sweden has admitted that it did too little to protect people living in nursing homes.

Unlike the rest of the world, Sweden largely avoided implementing mandatory lockdowns, instead relying on voluntary curbs on social gatherings, and keeping most schools, restaurants, bars and businesses open. Face masks were not mandated and it was very rare to see any Swede dressed as a bank robber.

The Swedish Public Health Agency “gave more advice than threatened punishment” while the rest of the world installed fear in people. “We forbade families to visit their grandmother in the nursing home, we denied men attendance at their children’s births, we limited the number who were allowed to attend church at funerals. Maybe people are willing to accept very strong restrictions if the fear is great enough.”

If we turn to other issues than mortality, it is clear that the harms done by the draconian lockdowns in the rest of the world have been immense in all sorts of ways.

For any intervention in healthcare, we require proof that the benefits exceed the harms. This principle was one of the first and most important victims of the pandemic. Politicians all over the world panicked and lost their heads, and the randomised trials we so badly needed to guide us were never carried out.

We should abbreviate the great pandemic to the great panic.

In my book, “The Chinese virus: Killed millions and scientific freedom,” from March 2022, I have a section about lockdowns.

Lockdown, a questionable intervention

The reborn intolerance toward alternative ideas has been particularly acrimonious in the debate about lockdowns.

There are two main ways to respond to viral pandemics, described in two publications that both came out in October 2020.

The Great Barrington Declaration is only 514 words, with no references. It emphasizes the devastating effects of lockdowns on short- and long-term public health, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed. Arguing that for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than influenza, it suggests that those at minimal risk of death should live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection and to establish herd immunity in the society.

It recommends focused protection of the vulnerable. Nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing for COVID-19 of other staff and all visitors. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home and should meet family members outside when possible.

Staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone. Schools, universities, sports facilities, restaurants, cultural activities, and other businesses should be open. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.

I have not found anything in the Declaration to be factually wrong.

The other publication is the John Snow Memorandum, which came out two weeks later.  Its 945 words are seriously manipulative. There are factual inaccuracies, and several of its 8 references are to highly unreliable science. The authors claim that SARS-CoV-2 has high infectivity, and that the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is several times higher than that of seasonal influenza.

This is not correct (see Chapter 5), and the two references the authors use are to studies using modelling, which are highly bias-prone.

They also claim that transmission of the virus can be mitigated through the use of face masks, with no reference, even though this was, and still is, a highly doubtful claim.

“The proportion of vulnerable people constitute as much as 30% of the population in some regions.” This was cherry-picking from yet another modelling study whose authors defined increased risk of severe disease as one of the conditions listed in some guidelines. With such a broad definition, it is easy to scare people. However, they did not tell their readers that the modelling study also estimated that only 4% of the global population would require hospital admission if infected,36 which is similar to influenza.

The two declarations did not elicit enlightened debates, but strongly emotional exchanges of views on social media devoid of facts. The vitriolic attacks were almost exclusively directed against those supporting the Great Barrington Declaration, and many people, including its authors, experienced censorship from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The Great Barrington Declaration has three authors; the John Snow Memorandum has 31. The former was published on a website, which is kept alive, the latter in Lancet, which gives its many authors prestige.

In 2021, over 900,000 people had signed the Great Barrington Declaration, including me, as I have always found that the drastic lockdowns we have had, with all its devastating consequences for our societies, were neither scientifically nor ethically justified. I did Google searches to get an idea how much attention the two declarations have had. For the Great Barrington Declaration, there were 147,000 results; for the John Snow Memorandum only 5,500.

The Great Barrington Declaration has not had much political impact. It is much easier for politicians to be restrictive than keeping the societies open. Once a country has taken drastic measures, such as lockdowns and border closings, other countries are accused of being irresponsible if they don’t do the same – even though their effect is unproven. Politicians will not get in trouble for measures that are too draconian, only if it can be argued that they did too little.

In March 2021, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, drew attention to some of the consequences of the current climate of intolerance.  In many cases, eminent scientific voices have been effectively silenced, often with gutter tactics. People who oppose lockdowns have been accused of having blood on their hands and their university positions threatened.

Many have chosen to stay quiet rather than face the mob, for example Jonas Ludvigsson, after he had published a ground-breaking Swedish study making it clear that it is safe to keep schools open during the pandemic, for children and teachers alike. This was taboo.

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya argued that with so many COVID-19 deaths,  most of which have been in old people, it should be obvious that lockdown strategies have failed to protect the old.

The attacks on the Great Barrington Declaration appear to have been orchestrated from the top. On 8 October 2020, Francis Collins, the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), sent a denigrating email to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and advisor for several US Presidents, where he wrote:

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?”

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins, reported that a letter he wrote about the potential harms of population-wide lockdowns in April 2020 was rejected by more than 10 scientific journals and 6 newspapers, sometimes with the pretence that there was nothing useful in it.  It was the first time in his career that he could not get a piece placed anywhere.

In September 2021, BMJ allowed Gavin Yamey and David Gorski to publish an attack on the Great Barrington Declaration called, Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt.  A commentator hit the nail when he wrote:

“This is a shoddy smear that is not for publication. The authors have not shown where their targets are scientifically incorrect, they just attack them for receiving funding from sources they dislike or having their videos and comments removed by social media corporations as if that was some indication of guilt.”

Kulldorff has explained what is wrong with the article. They claimed the Declaration provides support to the anti-vaccine movement and that its authors are peddling a “well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests.” But nobody paid the authors any money for their work or for advocating focused protection, and they would not have undertaken it for a professional gain, as it is far easier to stay silent than put your head above the parapet.

Gorski is behaving like a terrorist on social media, and he is perhaps a troll. Without having any idea what I had decided to talk about, or what my motives and background were, he tweeted about me in 2019 that I had “gone full on antivax.”  My talk was about why I am against mandatory vaccination for an organisation called Physicians for Informed Consent. Who could be against informed consent? But when I found out who the other speakers were, I cancelled my talk.

In January 2022, Cochrane published a so-called rapid review of the safety of reopening schools or keeping them open. The 38 included studies comprised 33 modelling studies, three observational studies, one quasi‐experimental and one experimental study with modelling components. Clearly, nothing reliable can come out of this, which the authors admitted: “There were very little data on the actual implementation of interventions.”

Using modelling, you can get any result you want, depending on the assumptions you put into the model. But the authors’ conclusion was plain nonsense: “Our review suggests that a broad range of measures implemented in the school setting can have positive impacts on the transmission of SARS‐CoV‐2, and on healthcare utilisation outcomes related to COVID‐19.”

They should have said that since there were no randomised trials, we don’t know if school closures do more good than harm. What they did is what Tom Jefferson has called “garbage in and garbage out … with a nice little Cochrane logo on it.”

About the failing scientific integrity of Cochrane reviews, the funder of the UK Cochrane groups noted in April 2021 that, “This is a point raised by people in the Collaboration to ensure that garbage does not go into the reviews; otherwise, your reviews will be garbage.”

Even though there was nothing to conclude from it, the authors filled 174 pages – about the length of the book you are currently reading – about the garbage they included in their review, which was funded by the Ministry of Education and Research in Germany.

A 2020 rapid systematic review in a medical journal found that school closures did not contribute to the control of the SARS epidemic in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Lockdowns could even make matters worse. If children are sent home to be looked after by their grandparents because their parents are at work, it could bode disaster for the grandparents. Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, the median age of those who died was 83.

The whole world missed a fantastic opportunity to find out what the truth was by randomising some schools to be closed while keeping others open, but such trials were never done. Atle Fretheim, research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, tried to do a trial but failed. In March 2020, Norwegian government officials were unwilling to keep schools open. Two months later, as the virus waned, they refused to keep schools closed. Norwegian TV shot the messenger: “Crazy researcher wants to experiment with children.” What was crazy was not to do the study. Craziness was also the norm in USA. In many large American cities, bars were open while schools were closed.

When people argue for or against lockdowns and how long they should last and for whom, they are on uncertain ground. Sweden tried to go on with life as usual, without major lockdowns. Furthermore, Sweden has not mandated the use of face masks and very few people have used them.

Author

  • Peter C. Gøtzsche

    Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published more than 97 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime. Following many years of being an outspoken critic of the corruption of science by pharmaceutical companies, Gøtzsche’s membership on the governing board of Cochrane was terminated by its Board of Trustees in September, 2018. Four board resigned in protest.

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Journalistic Malpractice at The New York Times

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From the Brownstone Institute

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

An obsequious press corps now serves as the mouthpiece for the country’s vast censorship apparatus. Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a front page story “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

The Gray Lady covered the battle for the First Amendment in familiar doublethink. As we’ve covered throughout the Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri) proceedings, the censors deny the censorship exists while insisting we should be thankful that it does.

Government lawyers have argued that plaintiffs manufactured the case, and the allegations of censorship are nothing more than “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.” At the same time, they insist the censorship is necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe followed their lead, arguing that the private-public censorship apparatus is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” but that eliminating it “will make us less secure as a nation and will endanger us all every day.”

Now, The New York Times and other news outlets have joined in supporting the censors. The piece cites Nina Jankowicz, the aspiring tyrant known for her Mary Poppins-themed calls for censorship, who claimed there was “no shred of evidence” behind allegations that the Biden administration called to stifle dissent.

The article describes the censorship apparatus as a farcical right-wing fever dream in which President Trump “casts himself as victim and avenger of a vast plot to muzzle his movement.” At the same time, the authors cite the American Intelligence Community’s leading advocates for restricting the flow of information.

Jankowicz headed the Department of Homeland Security’s board on disinformation until the Biden administration suspended the Domestic Ministry of Truth in response to reports that Jankowicz was a prolific spreader of misinformation, including the Steele Dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop.

Jankowicz complained, without irony, to the Times that the resistance to online censorship created a “chilling effect.” She explained, “Nobody wants to be caught up in it.”

The Times also quoted Katie Starbird, who said that “the people that benefit from the spread of disinformation have effectively silenced many of the people that would try to call them out.” The Gray Lady did not note the irony that Starbird claimed to be “silenced” as the paper of record quoted her on the front page of the Sunday edition, nor did they explain her role at CISA, the Department of Homeland Security agency at the center of the censorship industry.

While serving on CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee, Starbird lamented that many Americans seem to “accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.” Of course, those “norms” have been protected by the First Amendment for over 200 years. But CISA – led by zealots like Dr. Starbird – appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the most powerful information companies in the world to purge dissent.

The Times, Starbird, and Jankowicz represent the foundational lie underpinning the entire censorship complex: that the government and its bureaucrats hold a monopoly on truth. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently shared this view in oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, as she advocated for the right to abridge free speech provided the government offers a “compelling state interest.”

The First Amendment does not discriminate between true and false ideas; it offers a blanket protection of speech regardless of veracity. But notwithstanding legal protections, the Government has been the most prolific spreader of “misinformation” in the last four years. From natural immunity, to lockdowns, to vaccine efficacy, to mask mandates, to travel restrictions, to fatality rates, the “trust the science” crowd has silenced dissent that has often been more accurate than their government decrees.

In this process, left-wing institutions have abandoned their liberal values in the pursuit of power. As Brownstone outlined in “A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri,” supposedly liberal groups like Stanford University and Democratic Attorneys General urged the Court to promote censorship while the ACLU remained derelict in silence.

Journalists – once heralded as the Fourth Estate – have joined forces with the regime to disparage its challengers. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern referred to Murthy v. Missouri as “inane” and “brain-meltingly dumb.” He made no effort to report the hundreds of pages in discovery that revealed the coordinated censorship campaigns directed from the White House, the Intelligence Community, and Big Tech, nor did he grapple with the laundry list of follies that flourished under government-sponsored censorship, including the Iraq War, Covid lockdowns, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Instead, he declares definitively that the Biden administration – the same one that proudly ignores the Court’s orders on student loans and demands the censorship of its political enemies – acted within its powers in response to “a once-in-a-century pandemic.”

These conclusory statements, utterly detached from the truth, are nothing new for Stern, whose work reveals him to be little more than a spokesman for the Democratic Party. In the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, he called for increased investigations into Julie Swetnick’s easily-debunked allegation that Kavanaugh was a ring leader for a group of high school gang rapists. He described Christine Blasey Ford, a serial liar who has no evidence she ever met Kavanaugh, as a “folk hero to the left for the rest of time.” He chastised justices for not wearing masks as late as 2022 and derided judicial review of the nonsensical airline mask mandate as evidence of a “power-drunk juristocracy” and “badly broken” system.

Like so much of the authoritarian left, there is no nuance or variety to the power-seeking gambits. From mail-in voting to vaccine mandates to lockdowns to Elon Musk to affirmative action, the Slate author moves in lockstep with the mindless herd.

Stern is in no way remarkable, but he represents the transformation of the American left, which has ushered in a new era of authoritarianism draped in progressive language. Like Justice Jackson, the wolf comes in sheep’s clothing, dressed in politically correct standards of affirmative action and diversity politics. But the rainbow veneer cannot overcome the insidious threat to our republic.

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

A ruling for the government in Murthy v. Missouri could permanently transform the nation, the relationship between Government and private businesses, and Americans’ right to information. Even more alarmingly, it would suggest that due process no longer reigns supreme over political favoritism.

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks his son-in-law, William Roper, if he would give the Devil the protection of the law. Roper responds that he’d “cut down every law in England” to get to the Devil.

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” More asks. “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

Justice Jackson, the Biden Administration, Katie Starbird, and their allies in the media may believe they have a divine mission to censor alleged misinformation, that the Devil’s reincarnation has taken multiple forms in the bodies of RFK Jr., Alex Berenson, Jay Bhattacharya, and others; under our Constitution, however, the self-professed nobility of their missions does not excuse violations of the First Amendment.

Let us hope the Court realizes the graveness of the threat.

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  • Brownstone Institute

    Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

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