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The Case for Disbanding Public Health Agencies | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 31, 2022

Public health cannot be trusted. Its practitioners have shown us repeatedly that they will never choose less restrictive policy options, undertake cost-benefit analyses of their actions, or accept accountability for the massacres and harms they cause. Our only option is to excise this cancerous discipline.

https://mises.org/wire/case-disbanding-public-health-agencies

Sanjeev Sabhlok

During March of 2020, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, showed us how public health can be managed ethically by refusing to lockdown Sweden’s residents. The rest of the public health discipline, however, entered the territory in which we now place the universally castigated discipline of eugenics. Eugenics breaches ethics and causes enormous harm to the fabric of mankind. Likewise, lockdowns breach ethics and have terrorized or killed millions of people worldwide.

I recently assisted Professor Gigi Foster in preparing a cost-benefit analysis of Australia’s response to covid-19. This analysis, published as a book, shows that the harm caused by lockdowns in Australia exceeds any benefits by at least sixty-eight times. Magnifying these to the rest of the world, I estimate that between three to ten million people have been killed, trillions of dollars have been destroyed, and billions of people have been harmed worldwide by lockdowns; a “gift” that will keep on giving well into the future.

Lockdowns did not only increase noncovid related deaths. A study I carried out jointly with Jason Gavrilis in mid-2022, published by the India Policy Institute, shows that lockdowns also increased covid-19 deaths. Countries which implemented lockdowns and related measures have experienced, on average, more covid-19 deaths than Sweden. If the findings of this study are validated by other researchers, then the sheer evil of these lockdowns and associated policies will baffle future generations.

In this article, I show that the public health response to covid-19 is not the exception but the rule. The evil policies of public health are the inevitable outcomes of the intrinsic information failures and incentives deeply embedded within its structure.

A Pattern of Depredations

What happened in 2020 is typical of public health. As Luc Bonneux and Wim Van Damme explained in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2011 bulletin, a “culture of fear” and “worst-case thinking” were the hallmarks of public health during the avian and swine flu of the early 2000s: “The pandemic policy was never informed by evidence, but by fear of worst-case scenarios.” Sweden’s ethical covid-19 response must not mislead us into thinking that public health can somehow be reformed. Tegnell is not representative of public health.

As a remedy, Bonneux and Van Damme asked that public health be “accountable for reasonableness in a process of openness, transparency and dialogue with all the stakeholders, and particularly the public.” But true to its character, public health did none of this during covid-19 and instead imposed extreme censorship across the world.

Exaggerations and Breach of Pandemic Plans

The pre-2020 public health literature was explicit that policies involving lockdowns must never be pursued since their harms vastly exceed their benefits. The WHO pandemic guidelines of 2019 insisted on proportionate measures, had an extensive discussion of the ethics of each measure, and ruled out reckless measures like lockdowns and border closures. I summarized this literature in The Great Hysteria and The Broken State and in a complaint to the International Criminal Court.

But what happened during the swine flu was multiplied a thousandfold with covid-19. Fixated on the worst-case scenario once again (recall the Neil Ferguson model), public health stoked what I call the Great Hysteria.

It has been evident since around April 2020 that covid-19 is not particularly lethal. Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University wrote to me on April 9, 2022, that covid-19 is 50–500 times less lethal than the Spanish flu. Covid-19 is essentially as lethal as the seasonal flu. Sweden’s official mortality statistics, which adjust the death rate for population size, show no evidence of excess mortality in Sweden in 2020 once we control for the dry tinder effect of 2019 (The mild flu season of 2019 meant that many more of the elderly were vulnerable to respiratory disease in 2020.). We have a so-called pandemic with a lethality similar to the seasonal flu; therefore, covid-19 caused virtually no excess deaths in Sweden during 2020.

Nonetheless, practitioners of public health, except in Sweden, drummed up hysteria by grossly exaggerating covid-19 (calling it a once-in-a-century pandemic) to support the adoption of Chinese Communist Party inspired lockdowns in breach of long-standing, well-established public health findings.

Power without Accountability

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Sweden and Finland May Be Making a Fatal Blunder

Posted by M. C. on September 7, 2022

by Ted Galen Carpenter

The republic’s public finances were dire, Mexico continued to pose a looming military threat, and major European countries all eyed the infant country as a possible geopolitical pawn. Nevertheless, the decision to join the Union soon proved to be disastrous, since Texas did so just in time to become part of America’s slide into civil war. The Swedes and Finns must now hope that opting for NATO membership does not lead to a similar calamitous outcome.

antiwar.com

US and other Western leaders are beaming at the impending addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO, although there still is an outside chance that Turkey might block their admission to the Alliance. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted darkly that he may do so, unless the two candidate countries make certain concessions. He professes to be especially concerned about Sweden’s reluctance to extradite Kurdish “terrorists.” Given Erdogan’s long record of cynical opportunism on other issues, it is more likely that his threat is merely a bargaining tactic to show Ankara’s clout.

In addition to wanting policy concessions from Stockholm and Helsinki, he has sought concessions from the United States as NATO’s leader. His diplomatic hardball has already produced one benefit: Biden’s decision to approve a major sale of F-16 fighters to Turkey, a sale that had been on extended hold. Biden denied that there was any connection to Ankara’s position on NATO’s Nordic expansion, saying that “there was no quid pro quo with that; it was just that we should sell.” The timing of the White House approval, however, suggested otherwise. In any case, once Erdogan finishes with his diplomatic drama, NATO will have two new members.

Both countries bring significant military assets to the Alliance. Sweden, in particular, has a very capable, modern military, including a first-class air force. Finland possesses a smaller, less significant military force, but it has an 830-mile border with Russia. For NATO hawks, that situation is considered a major benefit, rather than another dangerous provocation toward Moscow. One might think that seeing the disastrous results of the West’s policy of making Ukraine a NATO military pawn would inhibit such recklessness with regard to Finland. Clearly, that is not the case, however.

The Kremlin’s reaction to the latest phase of NATO’s expansion has thus far been surprisingly mild. Moscow did inform both countries that if they joined the Alliance, Russia would be compelled to reposition its nuclear forces to focus more on Scandinavia, but there have not yet been any warnings that adding Sweden or even Finland crosses a “red line”—a warning that Vladimir Putin and other officials issued on several occasions with respect to Ukraine. One can hope that such restraint continues.

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Contrary to Public Myths, Rent Control Hasn’t Been a Success in Sweden

Posted by M. C. on July 20, 2022

The average wait time for a rent-controlled apartment in Stockholm has risen from five years to nine years in the last decade and even double this in the more desirable locations. The proportion of Swedish people ages 20–27 living with their parents has been rising and is currently the highest since records began.

It’s almost like the rent controls have caused housing shortages. Who could have predicted it! Just about anyone with eyes, honesty, a passing interest in economic history, and a not entirely closed mind. Price controls have always and everywhere produced the following results.

https://mises.org/wire/contrary-public-myths-rent-control-hasnt-been-success-sweden

James Murphy

Sweden’s rent control is widely touted by many who don’t understand economics as a model for how a property market should work. Young people in Ireland, for example, like to point to Sweden as a nirvana where rent control ensures easy availability of affordable and high-quality rental stock. 

I was once told by a young work colleague with strong socialist tendencies that they could move to Stockholm and get a high-spec modern apartment for a mere pittance compared to rents in Ireland. A cursory Google search, which garnered a string of news articles attesting to various issues arising from Swedish rent control, shone a harsh light on my young colleague’s fervently held, yet thoroughly fallacious belief.

Even left-wing newspapers and media outlets have had to accept (begrudgingly) that rent controls do not work. In Sweden, as in other cities with similar policies, rent-controlled apartment contracts have become valuable assets to be husbanded and exploited. Many tenants who hold the coveted rent-controlled “primary” contracts sublet properties to “secondary” tenants on the black market at rates double the rent-controlled amount. 

Once renters obtain primary contracts, they rarely relinquish them. Only half a percent of primary rental contracts in central Stockholm find their way back to the housing agency. It is almost impossible for any newcomers to the city to get one of the contracts (woe betide my young colleague and their putative flight to Stockholm!). People keen to jump the queue revert to a range of methods, ranging from leveraging personal networks (leverage newcomers rarely possess and hardly something a “fair” and corruption-free model rewards) to paying bribes (definitely corrupt) that can amount to several years’ rent.

As one can imagine, one class of people gaining advantage (through chance, corruption, or seniority) over other classes of people is not a recipe for social harmony. The first class’s then lording this over the others makes it worse. Another pernicious effect of the waiting lists is falling mobility across Sweden (people waiting on a particular housing agency’s list do not want to move and go to the back of another list). This lack of mobility is feeding into difficulties for employers, one in five of whom cite accommodation shortages as a major impediment to hiring staff and growing their workforces.

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Fact Check: Is the Moderna COVID Vaccine Banned in Sweden?

Posted by M. C. on October 27, 2021

How rare is rare? Not so rare if countries stop allowing it’s use.

This doesn’t bother the US government enough to stop advocating use in children.

We shall see.

https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-moderna-covid-vaccine-banned-sweden-1636608

By Ed Browne

…

On Wednesday, the Swedish Public Health Agency ordered a pause on the country’s rollout of the Moderna COVID vaccine, known as Spikevax, for people born in 1991 and later due to concerns around myocarditis and pericarditis.

The agency said the move was “precautionary” and due to “an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or heart sac.” It said the risk of being affected is “very small.”

Myocarditis is known as the inflammation of the heart muscle and pericarditis is known as the inflammation of the outer lining of the heart. Both are caused by some sort of trigger that leads to an immune response.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that cases have been reported in people who have had the Pfizer or Moderna COVID vaccines, and that this has mostly impacted male adolescents and young adults.

Sweden’s Public Health Agency said preliminary analysis from Swedish and Nordic data sources showed the risks were “especially clear when it comes to Moderna’s vaccine Spikevax, especially after the second dose.”

It said that “for the individual, the risk of being affected is very small, it is a very rare side effect.”…

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After Portugal Now Sweden Bans Travellers From The Most Vaccinated Nation Israel | GreatGameIndia

Posted by M. C. on September 8, 2021

https://greatgameindia.com/portugal-sweden-bans-travellers-israel/

After Portugal, now Sweden has become the second European nation to ban travellers from the most vaccinated nation Israel. Sweden also banned the entry of citizens from the United States, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro, and North Macedonia.

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Fauci’s Forecast: ‘More Pain And Suffering!’ Really?

Posted by M. C. on August 2, 2021

Great episode! Longer than usual as all the weekend CDC/Fauci flip flops and inconsistencies are discussed.Mask free Sweden-no deaths in the past month. Tests can’t tell regular Covid from variant.

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Mask-free Sweden nears zero daily Covid deaths as chief epidemiologist warns against ‘far-reaching conclusions’ about Delta strain — RT World News

Posted by M. C. on July 31, 2021

https://www.rt.com/news/530759-sweden-delta-masks-zero-covid-deaths/

As the CDC urges Americans to mask up against the Delta variant, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist has argued that more data is needed about the strain’s infectiousness. His mask-free nation is hovering at zero Covid deaths per day.

Anders Tegnell said on Friday that there was “a lot we do not know” about Delta and cautioned against drawing “far-reaching conclusions” about the coronavirus strain. He noted that the variant had been circulating in Sweden “for quite some time” with little effect, particularly in high-risk settings such as nursing homes.

His comments were made in response to newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggesting the Delta strain is more transmissible and could potentially cause more severe illness. The New York Times and other media outlets ran stories reporting that the CDC now believes the Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox – but this comparison didn’t seem to impress Tegnell. 

“It is difficult to say how contagious Delta is, [as] when it comes to chickenpox, we have been able to follow the disease for several years. The infectivity [of Delta] seems to be very uneven – in some cases, one person infects a hundred people, then we have other occasions when an infected person does not infect anyone at all,” he told Sweden’s Aftonbladet.

In separate remarks, he pointed to the fact that one-third of the country’s municipalities reported zero new Covid cases over the past week. At the same time, there was an uptick in cases among young people in Stockholm and other large cities.

And while US health authorities are pressing Americans in “high transmission” areas to mask up, Sweden dropped its last remaining mask recommendation – related to public transport – on July 1. While Sweden’s public health agency has supported measures such as social distancing and remote working, it has no recommendations for the use of face coverings in public spaces.

Reviled by the media for refusing to impose harsh lockdowns, Sweden’s less draconian approach to the health crisis appears to be paying off: The Scandinavian nation has recorded a total of eight Covid-linked deaths so far this month, an average of 0.25 deaths per day. While it’s possible this number will increase due to reporting lags, deaths have undoubtedly plummeted over the past several months. On June 4, Sweden reported 13 deaths – more than the entire month of July. 

Daily hospitalizations have also hovered near zero in July: On most days this month, the country saw between 0-2 Covid-cases requiring hospital treatment. At the same time, daily cases have fallen sharply since April. 

Despite the promising developments, Tegnell warned against getting too comfortable. He stressed on Friday that Sweden was still in a pandemic and urged his countrymen, especially those in younger age groups, to get vaccinated. 

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Horowitz: The abuse of schoolchildren continues even in the reddest states

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2021

Consider the fact that all of this harm was perpetrated against a generation of children for absolutely zero gain. The Peaster Independent School District of Parker County, Texas, for example, was one of the few counties in the country that never required masks or social isolation. According to Superintendent Lance Johnson, enrollment numbers were up this year, and it was one of the few districts in the country where the academic growth is tracking at grade level. “Our kids have thrived and our teachers have thrived,” he said. “And it’s just been real eye-opening to see how we’ve done things different than other schools.”

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-the-abuse-of-schoolchildren-continues-even-in-the-reddest-states

Daniel Horowitz

Despite a full year’s worth of science and data showing that kids in school are not at risk at all from this virus and that they are not meaningful vectors of spread, even the reddest of states are making them the last to get a reprieve from the mask fascism, rather than the first. This is likely the most radical policy ever implemented in our lifetimes. The muted response from most established conservative officials and organizations is shocking.

Yesterday, many conservatives celebrated yet another red state governor removing the mask mandate when Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon announced he would terminate the mandate by the end of the week. However, in his press release, he adds the following gem: “The face covering protocol will remain in place in K-12 schools as a safety measure to ensure that classroom learning and all student activities can continue to occur safely.”

I guess a “face covering protocol” is one way to euphemize the criminalization of the breathing of our children for absolutely no scientific reason and with no legal justification. How a policy like this could ever have gotten off the ground in a state like Wyoming, much less be continued indefinitely, reveals a weakness of resolve in our own people.

What’s worse than shutting down schools is acclimating children to a “new normal” of child abuse that, because it has the veneer of a return to normalcy, can continue long-term, if not forever. The bar of sanity was set so low from the get-go that the psychosis of masking children for a virus that affects them less than the flu will only get worse over time.

One school in the supposed red state of Ohio is now requiring double masking of children! Also in Ohio, a Dayton pediatrician is now warning about an increase in rhinovirus now that kids will return to school. The horror! Kids will now get the common cold again! Ironically, COVID has been so minimal for children that we forgot what it was like for significant portions of a class to be out of school with fever during the winter months. Ailments like strep throat, the flu, enterovirus, and other common infections will now be used as an excuse to either shut schools or forcibly mask children forever.

In fact, this is no joke. If imposing a severe form of abuse and prohibiting normal breathing of children for seven hours a day was implemented without a scintilla of blowback from most parents – all for a virus that doesn’t affect the kids – it’s not hard to see how the flu and even the common cold will be the new baseline for permanent masking. Despite the entire notion of regulating the lives of children being thoroughly discredited by the data, there is almost no county in the entire country where people can school their children without their faces being covered.

Data from Sweden published in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine examined ~2 million school-age children (ages 1 to 16) from March through June 2020, where there was no masking or other mitigation efforts, and found just 15 children (0.00075%) required hospitalization from COVID-19, and there was not a single reported death. They also found no greater risk of serious infection among teachers than the general population, adjusting for other variables. A similar study in Norway found remarkably low transmission in schools, even though there is no recommendation to wear masks.

With so few kids getting sick from this virus and so little evidence that masks work for anyone, why are we not considering the harmful effects of mask-wearing on children, sometimes as young as 3?

The first results of a German study of over 26,000 children and adolescents show 68% of parents reported impairments in their children as a result of mask-wearing, including the following side effects: irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), decreased happiness (49%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%), and fatigue (37%).

What are the benefits of this mandate, even if masks did work in stopping a spread, that could possibly justify this collateral damage? And what about the emotional damage? A 2010 paper from Harvard University observed the damage that can be caused by exposing them to endless fear and anxiety: “Ensuring that young children have safe, secure environments in which to grow, learn, and develop healthy brains and bodies is not only good for the children themselves but also builds a strong foundation for a thriving, prosperous society,” wrote the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child for Harvard University. “Science shows that early exposure to circumstances that produce persistent fear and chronic anxiety can have lifelong consequences by disrupting the developing architecture of the brain.”

Has anyone bothered to study what masks do to children’s wonderous God-given immune systems that have performed so well against this virus? How much bacteria do they help trap in the lungs of children? God didn’t design us to have our noses and mouths covered, especially at the developmental stage of life.

Consider the fact that all of this harm was perpetrated against a generation of children for absolutely zero gain. The Peaster Independent School District of Parker County, Texas, for example, was one of the few counties in the country that never required masks or social isolation. According to Superintendent Lance Johnson, enrollment numbers were up this year, and it was one of the few districts in the country where the academic growth is tracking at grade level. “Our kids have thrived and our teachers have thrived,” he said. “And it’s just been real eye-opening to see how we’ve done things different than other schools.”

It turns out that the absentee rates among teachers were only slightly higher than at that time in 2019, which clearly indicates that the rate of infection among teachers was not any higher than the general community, as was witnessed in Sweden and Norway.

“18 months ago what we’re doing to kids would’ve been criminal,” said Johnson. “And here we are fighting going back to that model, fighting letting kids be kids, and letting kids socialize and letting them have a normal school year.” How can we accept another day of this in all those red states? Demand better.

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Leading Academic Quits After Showing No School Children Died During The “First Wave” In Sweden – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on March 10, 2021

I wonder if the Swedish government paid for “cases”.

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2021/03/08/leading-academic-quits-after-showing-no-children-died-from-first-wave-of-pandemic-in-sweden/

In Brief

  • The Facts:Jonas F Ludvigsson, a paediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute is quitting his work on covid-19 because of harassment from people who dislike what he discovered.
  • Reflect On:Why are scientists, journalists and doctors who present information that opposes what we hear in the mainstream censored, ridiculed, harassed and never given any air time?

What Happened: A letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden” has found that “Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic…No child with Covid-19 died…Among the 1,951,905 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.”

It was published by Jonas F Ludvigsson a paediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute.

The study also showed that  “fewer than 10 preschool teachers and 20 schoolteachers in Sweden received intensive care for Covid-19 up until June 30, 2020 (20 per 103,596 school teachers, which is equal to 19 per 100,000). As compared with other occupations (excluding health care workers), this corresponded to sex- and age-adjusted relative risks of 1.10 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.49 to 2.49) among preschool teachers and 0.43 (95% CI, 0.28 to 0.68) among schoolteachers.

In a Karolinska Institute press release,  Ludvigsson indicated he was hopeful about the results. “It is very gratifying that serious COVID-19, defined here as needing treatment in an intensive care unit, is so rare among children despite schools being open during the pandemic,” he said. “The next step will be to follow up the children who were treated in an intensive care unit for COVID-19 to see if they have recovered fully. My gut feeling is that children who have been seriously ill because of MIS-C seem to recover fully eventually.”

After he published this piece, an article published in the British Medical Journal on the 18th of February by Ingrid Torjesen states the following,

The Swedish government has said that it will strengthen laws on academic freedom after a leading Swedish academic announced that he was quitting his work on covid-19 because of an onslaught of intimidating comments from people who disagreed or disliked his research findings….After the letter’s publication he was bombarded with angry messages through social media and email criticising the study and inferring that it and Ludvigsson were representative of the country’s covid-19 containment strategy.

The experience has taken its toll on Ludvigsson. He told the journal of the Swedish Medical Association (Lakartidningen) that for a week he woke up at 3 am every night and could not get back to sleep and that he had now lost his appetite for covid-19—both when it comes to speaking out and researching. He has decided to quit researching and debating covid-19.

He is trying to put the experience behind him and has said that he will not talk to the media about what happened. However, he told The BMJ that, although the findings were published in a research letter, this was “an actual study” that underwent formal external peer review, including statistical peer review, and the manuscript was revised four times before it was published.

Intimidation and threats against academics have risen with the growth of social media, and uncertainties and diverse opinions about covid-19 have added to the situation. In response, Sweden is planning to provide increased support for academic freedom through an amendment to its Higher Education Act.

Matilda Ernkrans, Sweden’s minister for higher education and research, told The BMJ, “It is deeply concerning when academics are threatened to the extent that they don’t have the courage to keep on doing their job. This is not a new phenomenon, but we have seen an increase of threats against academics related to research on the coronavirus. When people are silenced, it’s a threat against the freedom of speech and our democracy.  “To strengthen academic freedom, the Swedish government has proposed a new amendment that points out that education and research must be protected to enable people to freely discover, research, and share knowledge.”

Ole Petter Ottersen, president of the Karolinska Institute, told The BMJ that he found the increase in threats and harassment towards researchers very worrying.

“A tough debate and a diversity of opinions based on facts and evidence are necessary elements of science and public discourse, but hateful and scornful accusations and personal attacks cannot be tolerated. We already see that researchers retreat from the public debate after being threatened or harassed, and in my own institution a leading researcher just decided to give up his covid-19 research for the same reason,” he added, referring to Ludvigsson.

Given that the Karolinska Institute seems to be the focus here as well, I thought I’d mention that professor Anna-Mia Elkström, an epidemiologist from the Institute and professor Stefan Swartling Peterson, have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and come to the conclusion that least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight COVID as have died of COVID directly. You can read more about that story here.

Why This Is Important: Censorship of opinions, evidence, data, science and information is a big problem today, this is no secret. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden once said that “The Problem with fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee. But rather because we, as participants, as citizens, as users of these services, (need to) help each other…We point out what is fake, we point out what is true – the answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.”

Snowden, like many others, especially those of us in the field of alternative media are quite aware of the fact that censorship and the close relationship big tech companies have with governments is due to their goal “to dominate the conversation and information…They’re trying to make you change your behaviour.” (source) We’ve talked about this here at CE since our inception in 2009, that the job of mainstream media, and “fact-checkers” these days, in our opinion, seems to be perception control. This is especially true when it comes to major global events, ones that seem to benefit the rich and powerful. The world’s ten richest men have seen their combined wealth increase by half a trillion dollars since the covid pandemic began, for example.

As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? -Edward Snowden (source)

The Polish Government recently announced that it will be taking steps to make censorship by big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter completely illegal, comparing it to their experience during the communist era. The Prime Minister said that “Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently.”

The point is, it’s perfectly fine to disagree with one another, that’s healthy, and open debate is healthy especially during the times we are living in. What seems to be so off-putting to many is that debate is being discouraged. People are being urged not to do their own research, and any evidence or opinion that goes against what we hear from mainstream media is being completely ignored, censored or ridiculed to the point where people whose only source of information is mainstream news seem to be completely in the dark regarding important information and research.

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Sweden Has Had Schools Open, Over One Million Kids & No Deaths – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on January 13, 2021

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2021/01/08/study-sweden-has-schools-open-millions-of-kids-no-masks-no-lockdown-no-deaths/

In Brief

  • The Facts:A letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine outlines how despite no lockdowns, school closings, or mask mandates no school children have died from Covid-19, and 1 in 130,000 have been admitted to the ICU.
  • Reflect On:How dangerous is Covid for children? Is it less dangerous than the flu? Does the data justify lockdown measures and school closing? All of this is discussed within the article.

What Happened:  A letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden” has found that “Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic…No child with Covid-19 died…Among the 1,951,905 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.”

Sweden was one of the few countries that decided to keep schools open. The study points out that the number of deaths from any cause among the 1,951,905 children in Sweden (as of December 31, 2019) who were 1 to 16 years of age was 65 during the pre-Covid-19 period of November 2019 through February of 2020 was 65, and 69 during 4 months of exposure to Covid-19 between March and June of 2020. The data shows that there was no significant difference here.

When it comes to teachers, the study showed that  “fewer than 10 preschool teachers and 20 schoolteachers in Sweden received intensive care for Covid-19 up until June 30, 2020 (20 per 103,596 schoolteachers, which is equal to 19 per 100,000). As compared with other occupations (excluding health care workers), this corresponded to sex- and age-adjusted relative risks of 1.10 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.49 to 2.49) among preschool teachers and 0.43 (95% CI, 0.28 to 0.68) among schoolteachers (see the Supplementary Appendix).

In a Karolinska Institute press release, lead author and pediatrician Jonas Ludvigsson, MD, PhD, indicated he was hopeful about the results. “It is very gratifying that serious COVID-19, defined here as needing treatment in an intensive care unit, is so rare among children despite schools being open during the pandemic,” he said.

“The next step will be to follow up the children who were treated in an intensive care unit for COVID-19 to see if they have recovered fully. My gut feeling is that children who have been seriously ill because of MIS-C seem to recover fully eventually.”

The point is, children are not being admitted to the ICU in Sweden for C0vid-19, and children are not dying from Covid-19. Severe Covid-19 among children seems to be rare, and also has a 100 percent recovery rate. Given the fact that many infections are also asymptomatic, it really has no impact on their life. So, while we continue to hear that cases are soaring, it’s important to ask if this is really a big deal? And why is it that other viruses prior to this one that infect hundreds of millions and kill tens of millions a year were not subjected to the same scrutiny? Is it because authorities are worried that children will be a vector of transmission? Do asymptomatic people spread Covid?

This data also echoes what many doctors and scientists have been expressing regarding the severity of the virus, not just for children but for everybody. For example, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, from the Stanford University School of Medicine in California recently appeared on a JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) Network conversation alongside Mark Lipsitch, DPhil and Dr. Howard Bauchner, who interviews leading researchers and thinkers in health care about their JAMA articles.

During the conversation, Dr. Bhattacharya said that the survival rate from COVID-19, based on approximately 50 studies that’ve been published providing seroprevalence data, for people over 70 years of age is 95 percent. For people under the age of 70, the survival rate of COVID-19 is 99.95 percent. He went on to state that the flu is more dangerous than COVID-19 for children, and that we’ve (America) had more flu deaths in children this year than Covid deaths.

Bhattacharya is one of the initiators of The Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration has an impressive list of renowned scientists who have come on board as co-signers, and has now been signed by more than 50,000 doctors and scientists. It’s an initiative that strongly opposes lockdown measures.

Why This Is Important: This information is important because lockdown measures, according to many, aren’t really doing anything to stop the spread of the virus and may be delaying “herd immunity.” Furthermore we are taking all of these measures based on case counts, and a virus that has an extremely low mortality rate. Respiratory viruses prior to Covid already infected hundreds of millions and killed tens of millions a year. What’s even more concerning is the fact that medical professionals and scientists who share information that opposes the measures being taken by multiple governments are being subjected to extreme amounts of censorship. Scientific discussion is being shut down and we are seeing one opinion and side receive all of the attention.

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