Thread by @DrEricDing

🇸🇪EXPERT HID SCHOOL OUTBREAKS & EXCESS DEATHS IN KIDS, emails reveal—A Swedish proponent of pro-natural-infection-herd who advised Tegnell was caught deliberately omitting data on school outbreaks & excess deaths, as new whistleblower emails shed light.🧵
sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/c…

2) “Ludvigsson was one of 47 original signers of Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial document published in Oct 2020 that argued that pandemic policies should focus on protecting the vulnerable while rest of the population builds up immunity through natural infection.”

3) “Ludvigsson’s research seemed to support those ideas. In a review about children’s role in the pandemic, published in Acta Paediatrica in May 2020, he reported there had been “no major school outbreaks in Sweden,” which he attributed to “personal communication” from Tegnell.

4) “But as critics noted, Swedish media had reported several school outbreaks by then, including one in which at least 18 of 76 staff were infected and one teacher died. (Children were not tested.)”

5) But “His NEJM letter sounded another reassuring note. It reported that in all of Sweden, only 15 children, 10 preschool teachers, and 20 school teachers were admitted to intensive care units for COVID-19 complications between March and June 2020.......”

HOWEVER...

6) “But the emails show that in July 2020, Ludvigsson wrote to Tegnell that “unfortunately we see a clear indication of excess mortality among children ages 7-16 old, the ages where ‘kids went to school.’”

7) “For the years 2015 through 2019, an average of 30.4 children in that age group died in the four spring months; in 2020, 51 children in that age group died, “= excess mortality +68%,” Ludvigsson wrote.”

8) “The increase could be a fluke, he wrote, especially because the numbers are small. Deaths in 1- to 6-year-olds were below average during the same period, so combining the age groups helped even out the increase, he noted.

9) The emails “cast a serious shadow” on the research letter, Malmberg wrote in an email to NEJM.

Epidemiologist Jonas Björk of Lund University agrees that the time comparison used in the paper was unusual...

10) “I can see no good reason to compare with previous months,” he says. “It is standard to compare with the same period in previous years” to account for seasonality and to decrease statistical uncertainty.

11) “The mortality questions aside, critics say the NEJM letter just wasn’t very helpful in the heated debate over school closures. The main concern is not that children may end up in intensive care, but that **schools may accelerate community spread**, says Antoine Flahault.

12) meanwhile less look at total excess deaths in Sweden versus its neighbors. Data from @ArielKarlinsky’s team.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1363275885609115654

13) And did Sweden have a minor or big excess mortality? Well... only the largest excess mortality per capita in over 100 years... if that counts as significant?

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1352133090215387136

14) here was the letter to NEJM raising the issues by @lonnibesancon.

https://twitter.com/lonnibesancon/status/1366433855025131523

15) here is the email letter (translated from Swedish - original emails quoted below it) clearly showing their communication and knowing about the excess deaths in 🇸🇪 children.

https://twitter.com/galinash/status/1367052448381210628

16) I believe @NEJM needs to either retract that paper, or post a serious “WARNING OF CONCERN” on top of it.

17) It gets worse, apparently, the author even went to Tegnell to **manufacture a reference** out of thin air by ghost writing a proposed statement for Tegnell...

https://twitter.com/drkatrin_rabiei/status/1367240082651029504