Thread by @SwedenTeam

1/ Sweden’s no lockdown covid response is often called an “experiment”

This is utterly false, and it’s easy to prove.

In this thread I’ll go through pre-2020 pandemic plans from the WHO, CDC, Johns Hopkins, UK, and Australia.

NONE recommended 2020-style lockdowns.

Let’s start with the WHO pandemic plan from October 2019.

Quarantine, border closure, and contract tracing are explicitly NOT recommended.

They also reviewed the world’s 10 best mask studies. All concluded masks don’t work.

apps.who.int/iris/bitstream…

Here’s the CDC’s 2017 pandemic plan

ZERO mention of restaurant closures, let alone business closures.

Stay-at-home orders? Nope. Only VOLUNTARY home isolation of the sick and exposed.

Masks? Only by sick people in crowded situations.

cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/6…

The CDC’s 2017 plan did consider “temporary” school closures, but it never defined what “temporary” means.

So we turn to the CDC’s 2007 pandemic plan. For a covid-level pandemic they “considered” closures of no more than 4 weeks.

FOUR. WEEKS.

cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-r…

Fun fact: prior to 2007, “social distancing” did not exist in any pandemic plan.

It was a theoretical, untested concept pushed into CDC pandemic guidance by George W. Bush, based on a high school science project.

You can’t make this shit up.

nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/…

Here’s the UK’s 2011 pandemic plan:

Masks, Border Closures, Mass Gatherings: not recommended, no evidence to support their efficacy.

Also: “It will not be possible to stop the spread of, or to eradicate, the pandemic”

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

Here’s Australia’s pandemic plan.

It starts with an Ethical Framework “ensuring that the rights of the individual are upheld as much as possible” and privacy and confidentiality are “important and should be protected”

Wow.

www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/…

Australia (cont.)

School closures: “Not recommended”

Workplace closures: “Not generally recommended”

Masks: “No evidence”

Canceling mass gatherings: “Not generally recommended”

Interesting fact: Western Australia had a covid-sized flu (or perhaps undetected covid?) in 2019.

Yet they never closed schools or businesses. And they never wore masks or closed borders.

And literally no one noticed or cared.

ww2.health.wa.gov.au/Articles/N_R/N…

Johns Hopkins put out a pandemic plan in September 2019

“There is a broad lack of evidence of efficacy” of NPIs (Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, aka lockdowns)

apps.who.int/gpmb/assets/th…

Johns Hopkins also calculates what a 1918-level pandemic would look like today.

Their estimate: 100 to 400 million deaths.

Current covid deaths: 4 million

Any politician, journalist, or covidiot who compares covid to the 1918 flu is off by a factor of 25 to 100.

The Johns Hopkins plan even mentions lab leaks:

“These events are believed to be considerably underreported due to lack of reporting mechanisms and potential consequences to the researchers or research institution.”

Johns Hopkins also looks at pandemic plans around the world.

Surely China, which claims it eradicated covid with 8 weeks of lockdowns in one province, must have had a fabulous pandemic plan, right?

Nope. The last time China published a pandemic plan was “before 2009”

Still not convinced Sweden wasn’t an experiment?

January 23, 2020:

“Trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science,” said Gauden Galea, the WHO’s representative in China. “It has not been tried before as a public health measure.”

apnews.com/article/united…

So there you have it, folks.

Sweden was not a bizarre outlier.

It was the only country that actually followed pre-2020 pandemic plans.

Everyone else panicked, threw their existing plans out the window, and slavishly copied China … with utterly disastrous results.

@EthicalSkeptic More on Australia’s very unusual 2019 flu season:

abc.net.au/news/2020-02-1…