It is chapter and verse nowadays among COVID-19 policy dissidents – or at least those who get amplified the most on X – that ‘Sweden won’: namely, by bucking the trend and refusing to lock down, taking the initial hit of higher excess mortality at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic but ultimately being rewarded by lower excess mortality over the official course of the pandemic as a whole. Graphs like the below, showing Sweden with the lowest excess mortality in all of Europe during the pandemic period, are widely-cited as evidence of this victory of Sweden’s ‘no lockdown’ approach.
But sceptics of the Covid measures have been spectacularly wrong-footed in citing such data, since if Sweden did indeed resist lockdown, it by no means resisted mass vaccination. As the below Statista graph illustrates, Sweden in fact had one of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in Europe.
Read More: If ‘Sweden Won’, Why are Swedish Birthrates Plummeting?
