A top official from The World Health Organization (WHO) praised Sweden on Wednesday as a “model” for the rest of the world, in fighting the novel coronavirus.
That’s a 180 degree turn around from director Tedros’ orders.
“I think if we are to reach a new normal, I think in many ways Sweden represents a future model of — if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns,” Dr. Mike Ryan said while speaking to reporters from Geneva.
“They’ve been doing the testing, they’ve ramped up their capacity to do intensive care quite significantly,” he added. “And their health system has always remained within its capacity to respond to the number of cases that they’ve been experiencing.”
He says the criticism of Sweden for not locking down harshly like the rest of the world are unfair. Ryan praised its public policy.
Sweden’s totals remain low in relation to the rest of Europe.
AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE MODELS
A Swedish professor who was the State Epidemiologist for Sweden between 1995 to 2005, then served as the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), blasted Professor Neil Ferguson. Ferguson is the British epidemiologist from the Imperial College London, who wrote a paper that convinced many countries, including the United States, Germany, France, and those in the United Kingdom, to impose lockdowns to deal with the coronavirus.
The professor said Ferguson was “normally quite arrogant,” according to Unherd.
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Professor Johan Giesecke was interviewed by the Swedish broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet. Referring to Ferguson’s interview on UnHerd, he stated, “I know [Ferguson] a little and he is normally quite arrogant, but I have never seen him as tense and nervous as during that interview.” Giesecke added, “Ferguson modified quite a few of the straightforward statements [from his report], but still seems to think that the lethality is somewhere at just under one percent, while I think it is actually much lower, perhaps as low as 0.1%.”
Giesecke had given an interview to Unherd in mid-April in which he was asked about the Imperial College report, which had suggested 510,000 people would die in the U.K. without a lockdown and 250,000 if mitigating steps were taken.
He answered:
I think it’s not very good, and the thing that they miss a little is that any models for infectious diseases —they’re very popular, many people do them — they’re good for teaching, they seldom tell you the truth because — I make a small parenthesis — which model could have assumed that the outbreak would start in northern Italy, in Europe, Difficult to model that one. And any such model — it looks complicated, there are strange mathematical formulae, and integral signs and stuff, but it rests on the assumptions. And the assumptions in that article will be heavily criticized for — I won’t go through that, it would take the rest of your day if I went through them all. The paper was never published scientifically; it’s not peer-reviewed, which a scientific paper should be; it’s just an internal departmental report from Imperial. And it’s fascinating; I don’t think any other scientific endeavor has made such an impression on the world as that rather debatable paper.
He was asked if the lockdown was misguided and he said it was and he is worried about politicians assuming dictatorial powers: “Yes. I think so, on the whole. What I’m saying is that people who will die a few months later are dying now and that’s taking months from their lives so that’s maybe not nice. But comparing that to the effects of the lockdown… what am I most afraid of? It’s the dictatorial trends in eastern Europe; Orban is now dictator of Hungary forever; there’s no finishing that. I think the same is popping up in other countries; it may pop up in other more established countries as well. I think the ramifications can be huge from this.”
Giesecke said Sweden had not been “on our toes” to protect the elderly, acknowledging, “There are many things we could have done better a couple of months ago.”
He was asked, “What was it about this pandemic that was so different that has led to this global shutdown?” He answered, “New disease, lot of people dying, you don’t know really what will happen, and this fear of contagion is almost genetic in people. And showing political strength, decisiveness, force. Very important for politicians.”
Ferguson has been wrong time and again but for some reason, people still listen to him. Ferguson was wrong about the Swine Flu of 2009, claiming 60,000 would die. The death toll was under 500. He predicted 200 million could die with the 2005 Bird Flu, but it was less than 1,000 in the end.
The U.S. IHME was almost as bad as Ferguson in predicting.
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