No masks, please. We're Swedish.
As politicians and health officials from Australia to Virginia announced their intentions to make future coronavirus vaccines mandatory, Sweden's authorities maintained their opposition to the global consensus on acceptable policy responses to Covid-19. The country's chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell recently defended his country's contrarian stance based on his recommendations and those of his colleagues at Sweden's Public Health Agency. As I detailed here, from the beginning of the outbreak Sweden chose not to close primary schools, restaurants, bars, or sporting events. Despite almost weekly propagandistic articles by global corporate media invested in the doomsday narrative condemning Tegnell's approach and predicting catastrophe, they stuck with it. The result has been a disease trajectory broadly similar to the rest of Europe -- better than some, worse than others. Sweden's authorities have admitted they had more deaths than they had hoped in the beginning, but they attribute that not to their overall light-touch approach but to their failure to adequately isolate their nursing home population, where a large number of their deaths have occurred. Based on the rhetoric elsewhere, though, Sweden's 85% urban population should have had exponentially higher disease and death rates than strict lockdown countries like the UK and Belgium. That simply hasn't happened.
Sweden has also refused to mandate mask wearing by the general public, arguing that current science is mixed at best and does not support the idea that masks prevent community spread outside of confined hospital settings. Because it's widely known that SARS-Cov-2 virus particles are significantly smaller than the pores in masks used by the public, many of the studies being cited as evidence focus on the effectiveness of masks in limiting water droplet and aerosol dispersal. Few of the studies measure actual spread of disease. Most merely postulate that disease spread would be lessened because of the effects they show in droplet transmission.Â
Covid-19 is still too new to have reliable, controlled studies of community transmission to draw from. The best we can do for now is to look at studies of community spread of similar viruses and respiratory illnesses, such as influenza, and how effective masks are at preventing their spread. Just this past May, the Centers for Disease Control published this review of studies into the effectiveness of various forms of personal protective measures against community spread of the flu. The pooled analysis found "no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks" in the general public. Until a significant body of rigorous, controlled, peer-reviewed studies on the spread of SARS-Cov-2 exists, studies on the spread of similar respiratory diseases is the best we have, and those studies don't support the prevailing "wear the damn mask" gospel.
That's probably why the World Health Organization and the CDC had never recommended mask wearing by the general public before, and continued to recommend against it as recently as April of this year before abruptly making an about-face. Many now claim that the WHO and CDC took that position because masks were in short supply and were desperately needed by medical personnel. And it's true that some from those organizations mentioned that as a secondary reason that the public should avoid using them. But the primary reason cited was that they were simply ineffective at preventing community spread and could actually be counter-productive by making people less likely to adopt what were deemed more effective measures, like hand-washing and distancing. People who now say that preserving masks for medical professionals was the real reason for the previous recommendations don't seem to grasp the implications of what they're saying: that public health officials lied about the effectiveness of masks for the general public in the early days of the pandemic in order to preserve them for doctors and nurses. If public health officials lied then, why should we believe them now? In fact, the best science says they were telling the truth then. The lie came later.
When media personalities, celebrities, public officials, and the comforting voice over the PA system at your local Kroger constantly reinforce the idea that muzzling entire populations is critical because "we're all in this together", they want you to think that the enforced measures are supported by unequivocal science. But that's true only if you define "science" as the pronouncements of favored individuals tied to agencies and organizations that act as revolving doors between government, multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies, and nongovernmental organizations with financial conflicts of interest. Scientists who depart from the script, including epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians with real-world experience at dealing with patients, are sidelined, and if they gain an audience of any size, they're demonized and de-platformed.Â
It never ceases to amaze me that people who are otherwise critical of the actions and motives of big corporations and organizations that represent those interests uncritically accept anything that comes out of agencies and organizations that are peopled with large numbers of individuals who move freely back and forth between government and giant pharmaceutical companies throughout their careers. You'd think at the very least a media class that supposedly acts as a check on power would present informed dissenting views from qualified experts on occasion rather than pretend that those views are held only by unqualified quacks spreading "disinformation". One of the most dangerous notions in our society today is the idea that intelligent progressives are too smart to be indoctrinated by propaganda.
And that's why the existence of Sweden is anathema to the governmental-pharmaceutical-media complex, and why the only time you hear about that country now is when its detractors manage to find some new minor blip in the statistics that they can portray in a negative light. Sweden puts the lie to the narrative that absent the dictates of the benevolent authoritarians who tell us what to do, millions of Americans would have died from Covid-19 by now. When the trend line of new confirmed per-capita Covid-19 deaths has been dropping steadily for months in Sweden without lockdowns and without mask mandates, something else must be at play.Â
Many contend that herd immunity might be impossible with Covid-19, but if they're right then that doesn't speak well for the prospects of an effective vaccine, the purported holy grail touted as the only possible route to normality. Vaccines work through an artificially created herd immunity, exposing people to an inert form of the pathogen so that they develop antibodies, mimicking the process that happens when they're naturally exposed. Whether the relatively encouraging disease trend in Sweden is a function of some developing herd immunity or something else is still open to question. What's not open to question is that many supposedly authoritative voices on this pandemic are speaking out of both sides of their mouths while the gagged masses dutifully hanging on their every word are told to pay no attention to that country behind the curtain.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.