00:00:00.000Yeah, you kind of touched upon the Great Barrington Declaration. We'll get to that in a bit. But just a question before that, with so many screw ups by governments around the world, who, in your opinion, got it right? Which places got it right? Well, almost everyone else was getting it wrong. And what exactly did they get right?
00:00:20.620Well, I don't think there's any place that got it all completely right. It was not possible in the fog of war. But I do think that some places were better than others. So, for instance, let's take Sweden, because that's the most prominent example of a country that followed a very different policy. I think in the early days of the pandemic, the Swedish Stockholm public health actually made huge errors.
00:00:44.440They sent COVID-infected patients back to their nursing homes, causing tremendous deaths in those locations. But very early on, they corrected themselves. Anders Tagnol, the head of Swedish public health, made a decision to follow the old pandemic plan, which is protection of the vulnerable.
00:01:05.560Don't spread panic. Try to calm the population down. And that's what he did. So, like, for instance, they didn't close schools because the kids were not at risk.
00:01:18.580And a data out of Iceland was suggesting that kids were not particularly efficient spreaders of this disease.
00:01:24.300So, you had, like, so, and on the other hand, they tried to, after that horrible mistake in Stockholm, they tried to advise older people, you know, that this actually is a high-risk disease for them.
00:01:38.240They organized communities to provide support for older people living in the community so they could reduce the amount of exposures they had.
00:01:46.540They actually did recommend limitations in mass gatherings, which are completely reasonable in the disease of spreading.
00:01:53.080But they were, mostly, it was a voluntary kind of effort to try to, and the reason why they could do this is because they built trust with the population.
00:02:00.600The population trusted Swedish public health because their Swedish public health never lied to their population.
00:02:06.520And as a consequence, they could make these measures that actually turned out to be quite effective.
00:02:12.880The overall excess mortality in Sweden is actually pretty low, you know, on par with the other Scandinavian countries and below much of the rest of Europe, certainly much lower than the United States.