 Sweden did play this role of the contrarian. It was a very inconvenient counter example to all these other countries in the world that had locked down. And this was the kind of coverage that you would see the New York Times in July, 2020, Sweden has become the world's cautionary tale. You had them saying that Sweden put stock in the sensibility of its people. And for that grave sin, the coronavirus is blamed for 5,420 deaths, which is 40% more than the US per million people, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland, six times more than Denmark. We heard a lot of these comparisons to Sweden's Nordic neighbors in particular. Donald Trump was out there tweeting, Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lock down. The United States made the correct decision. We've got a clip from Trump that we're going to play here where he's making essentially the same point. Let's roll that. Now, they talk about Sweden, but Sweden is suffering very greatly. You know that, right? Sweden did that. The herd, they call it the herd. Sweden's suffering very, very badly. It's a way of doing it. But everybody has been watching everybody else. And so far, almost every country has done it the way we've done it. We've chosen to do it. If we didn't do it that way, we would have lost hundreds of thousands of more people, OK? And then I want to get your reaction in a second, Johan. But first, just back to back with that clip, I want to play a clip of what you were saying in that same period. That was from April 7, 2020. This was from about a week later what you were saying about the experience in Sweden and how people should think about it. Let's roll the clip of Johan from April 2020. My personal point of view, I'm not an epidemiologist. I can't even pronounce the word. It seems like I'm obviously not an expert when it comes to these issues. But so far, I'm broadly sympathetic to the Swedish model. Restricting freedoms might be necessary during pandemics, but only when we have good reasons to assume that this will help us when it comes to our long-term health. And when we don't know, I think we can do what we do know. As Johan Stewart once put it, in every instance, the burden of making out a strong case lies not on those who resist, but on those who recommend government interference. So that was a very humble and cautious defense of Sweden's approach. What was it like for you during that time period cautiously defending Sweden amidst this firestorm of criticism of the country's approach? Yeah, we weren't popular at that time. And both foreign friends and foreign media got in touch and asked me, are you all crazy? Have you gone crazy over there? Because there's a pandemic, and it seems like you haven't noticed. So I had to explain, not myself, but I had to explain the Swedish model again and again. And I think, precisely for this reason, exactly what Donald Trump talked about here, that everybody did it. Everybody accepts Sweden locked down societies entirely. And then in that case, first of all, why did they do it? And it seemed like Trump didn't have much more of a suggestion than everybody did it. So we didn't. That's actually exactly what researchers say when they look into this. The moment when societies locked down was not related in any way. It was impossible for researchers to find any kind of correlation with the state of transmission of the virus, geographical location, number or capacity of the health care system, and things like that. The one thing it correlated with was, what did the neighbors do? What did countries close by? You did. So it seems like it was a bandwagon effect. Rather than looking into the data, the research, and doing a cost-benefit analysis, people just did it. Because obviously, if you make a mistake and the country suffers, it's OK. If everybody did the same mistake, then you can say, we had no alternative. We just had to lock down, for example. But if you're the odd man out and you make a decision and your people suffer, then everybody will blame you. And so countries just panicked into this kind of lockdown policy. And Sweden was the one place where that didn't happen. It was, I mean, in a sense, that was a huge risk, right? That it requires a certain, I think, courage on the part of Swedish pandemic authorities. I think it did, especially because they would be the ones to blame if things went wrong. And but what they were saying all the time is that it isn't us who have taken this risk. We're the one place that actually didn't enter into an unprecedented panic position of locking down entire societies, economies, schools, like that. Health authorities had war-gained pandemics before the World Health Organization and others. And no one has suggested that we should lock down entire societies. But then suddenly when this happened and China started to lock down and then Italy, everybody just got on board. The thing that I think is also so interesting about this, excuse my interruption, but the thing that I think is so interesting about this is also that China had an especially, just astonishingly intense lockdown, neighborhood level enforcers going door to door and these mandatory quarantines that made it so in many cases you had families trapped in their apartment legitimately unable to even in some cases go outside for a walk, depending on when the virus was searching in different neighborhoods and regions. But the thing that's kind of interesting is not all lockdowns are structured the same and China's was considered too authoritarian and full-throated and I guess difficult to enforce for that to be implemented in other countries. But it's odd because Sweden got, I think especially at the beginning of the pandemic, a different treatment as an outlier, even though China too was an outlier in its severity. That's kind of stunning to me that the onus is on the people emphasizing freedom, freedom of movement, people's ability to continue to go to the weddings and funerals of their loved ones. It's fascinating to me that the authoritarianism didn't require as much justification, but the freedom did. Yeah, and let me just jump in there because it was the justification that was being used to criticize Sweden so harshly was always, it wasn't that it was the death rate was way out of whack with every other country that was doing lockdowns. It was specifically, well, if you compare it only to the Nordic, it's Nordic neighbors. If you compare only to Finland and Norway and Denmark, it looks bad at this snapshot in time. If you were comparing it to the United Kingdom or Italy at that time, it's not gonna look as bad. And so that applies that there's other factors at play perhaps than just whether you're locking down or not. But we have a clip of Sweden's state epidemiologist, Anders Tenjell responding to exactly that point that was put to him by the BBC interviewer on a very tough and good interview back in 2020. So let's roll a segment from that interview and I'd like you to respond to what Tenjell's saying here. There's not the brutal truth that you have had many more deaths in Sweden than you would have had if like your Scandinavian neighbors, you had imposed an early and very strict lockdown policy. I think that's very difficult to know. I mean, the death toll in Sweden is mainly in the long-term facilities for long-term ill elderly people. And we had very much an unfortunate spread in those facilities in a way that some other countries had but not our Nordic neighbors and why we had a spread in Sweden and not in our neighboring countries. That's something we're trying to investigate now. But with respect, Dr. Tenjell, isn't that part of my point that you probably would not have had that catastrophic spread of COVID-19 through your care homes, particularly around Stockholm, if you had run a more strict, a less open policy for the general population? Yeah, I mean, these people meet a lot of people even if you have a lockdown. So you can't isolate them. So in that way, a lockdown would not have stopped the spread into them. And we can see now when we are starting to look at these places, we see a decline in the incidents in those places once we start really focusing and getting them to focus on basic hygiene procedures and so on. So Tenjell defended himself by saying that it was too early to say whether lockdown saved lives or just delayed inevitable deaths. How does that look in retrospect? Yeah, there are many factors here. And let me just mention one important difference here between Sweden and other Nordic countries. We got the virus earlier at an earlier stage, partly because Stockholm kids are home on a winter break in early February. And many go to the Italian and Austrian Alps to ski exactly at the moment when we had the peak of transmission in Italy. So it was already within our societies, especially in Stockholm and then the elderly care homes before there was any discussion anywhere about locking down societies. So this goes to the tradition. We saw more of a coronavirus surge in Stockholm than in Malmo, for example, because of the timing of school breaks. Exactly, and that's a very important point. You could see that Malmo in Gothenburg, our second and third city in Sweden, had more of the Norwegian and Danish experience because they didn't go on a winter break down to Italy at that time because the winter break comes, it's staggered, so it comes at different moments in time. And this goes to one important traditional point from epidemiology. The reason why they rarely recommend countries to shut down borders and traffic and so on is that the moment you begin to think about doing things like that, it's already too late because it happens once the virus is already there. And then you only hurt yourself in other ways, hurting access to everything from health workers, medical supplies and trade and the economy and so on. Not to mention the human toll. Also, I don't know what your family situation is, but my family split between the United States and the EU. And so to some degree, when you begin to close off borders, it puts a lot of people in very difficult situations where depending on their visa status and their passport, they might not see their family members or their loved ones or their partner for many, many months on end, which is a huge human toll that I think frequently are policy makers. There's no way to attach a monetary value to that, but it is a profound sense of loss. This is such an incredibly important point because that's exactly the kind of perspective that would never appear to the technocrats at the decision table. Sort of we've got to have to do something about X, but then there are so many variables that are incredibly important to human beings that kind of be quantified to that extent and that they cannot have knowledge about, not meeting your loved ones, not meeting friends and family and so on could be almost as dangerous to health as getting the virus. So, and that's a reason why policy based on recommendations gives you that sort of incredibly important loophole. You're able to do things that are so important to you. So when you look at the total death toll and the aspects of health, you have to look at other things as well, not just COVID, but also mental illness. You're gonna have to look at domestic abuse. You have to look at suicide or loss of exercise and social adaptation in schools and in friendship circles and so on. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Johan Norberg about Sweden's pandemic policies. You can watch the full conversation right here or another clip from that conversation right over here.