 Welcome to the Reason Stream, I'm Zach Weissmuller joined by Liz Wolf and today's conversation will mark another entry in what's shaped into a kind of pandemic retrospective series. COVID-19 changed the world and for a time ushered in the kind of heavy handed government interventions that were previously unimaginable to many of us in 21st century America. It's important to avoid dwelling endlessly on the past, but the world can't afford to let what unfolded in 2020 happen again. And if we don't take a full accounting of what exactly went wrong during COVID as well as which policies were effective and respectful of our basic liberties, it'll be far too easy for many of the same unapologetic politicians, pundits and public officials to lead us further down a destructive path. And that's why it's time to talk about Sweden, the one European country that didn't follow the herd and lockdown. So why did Sweden resist? And what ultimately happened there? Our guest today is Johan Norberg and he's going to help us understand all of that. He's an author and senior fellow at the Cato Institute who recently published a report called Sweden during the pandemic, pariah or paragon. Johan, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me on the show. And to start Johan, help us understand exactly what the reality on the ground in Sweden was during the early days of the pandemic. You were there. What was it like? Yeah, well, you know, life wasn't normal in Sweden during that time because we all had this perception that something scary was going on in the world. So we did have lots of social distancing and people working from home and didn't have the same ability around towns as we usually do. But on a voluntary basis, this was based on mostly on recommendations from the government rather than bans. We didn't have policemen investigating why we went to the shop or met friends and relatives or went to a restaurant or a bar. And that made Sweden seem very different from most other places that we heard about at the time. So different from what we would normally be like, but much more different from other parts of the world. Yeah, I mean, I remember seeing the images that were published of Sweden at the time and some of the b-roll that would run on newscasts and it looked fairly bustling. It, you know, it was like, yeah, and they're contrasting this with just an abandoned Times Square or whatever. I mean, you but you're saying that it was not by any means normal. Were did you, what was your reaction to the way things were portrayed in pictures and in media? How accurate was that? Well, you know, many of those pictures were taken from a specific angle so that you can see a crowd, even though it might be several feet or meters between them. There was this attempt by, I think, almost the whole world to portray Sweden as we're like this, this crazy outlier where we just go about business as usual. And we don't care about how many people suffer and die because of it. And I think partly because so many were investigated in their own national lockdown. So there had to be something wrong with the Swedes. But as a matter of fact, even though again, it was different from what you would see in Times Square, it was the case that mobility was reduced quite dramatically. You could see that in mobile phone operators, then they could see that Sweden abandoned public transportation and worked from home and so on almost as much as our Nordic neighbors. But we did it on a voluntary basis, which gave us that loophole. If you really needed to go somewhere, be somewhere, be with someone, you could do it. And in a weird ironic way, I think that helps Swedes to stick to social distancing for longer because it wasn't imposed from above. It was imposed by people just don't want to hurt themselves and their loved ones. Did any journalists actually stop to consider the cell phone tracking data that you're referencing? I didn't see much of that. We heard it from the Swedish Public Health Authority, looking at weekly reports and telling, looking at the data and showing that it's quite similar to other places. But it wasn't much of media interest. So the thing that was so interesting to me being in the US is watching so many journalists be cheerleaders for the pandemic policy advocated by Anthony Fauci. In Sweden, what was that dynamic like? Were most journalists supportive of Anders Tenjell's strategy or were they highly critical? How did that work? I would say that we had a healthy debate, Bro and Con. And that's what you should have, right? The media shouldn't be cheerleaders for any kind of policy. And I think partly because we didn't politicize the pandemic like other countries did. Because there wasn't this sort of government command and control system where everybody's supposed to do it in one particular way. That creates all manners of resentments and questions about what is this really based upon. Whereas if there's a recommendation and people are allowed to make their own decisions, it isn't as heavily politicized. And I think the healthier debate in Sweden reflected that. But when it comes to what the public perceived and the general attitude, you can see that Swedes generally were in agreement with the Swedish policies. There was always a majority in favor of those policies and between 10 to 20% in favor of a stricter and more harsh lockdown. So it was not a winner to come out and be in favor of lockdowns. I think it's worth appreciating that point you're making about the voluntary nature of the social distancing at the beginning there. Because there's often this embedded assumption that this can only be achieved by a government policy and clearly Sweden is a counter example to that. And yeah, when you're taking photos that portray something that is a misleading picture, I remember the same thing happening in the early days of Florida. In Florida, when they reopened the beaches, there would be these long-lenses that make the beach look like everyone is crowded together on the beach. And then if you take it with a shorter lens, you see that people are actually on the beach outside social distancing probably one of the safest activities that now we know that you could be engaging in. So, you know, and then the voluntary aspect as you laid out there allows for some learning and adaptation as we learn more rather than you being stuck in this top-down imposed policy. I think it's worth digging into exactly what the policy of Sweden was, and I've pulled a slide from the government's, this is their post-COVID commission. So they looked at what did we do, what right, what did we do wrong, and at the beginning here they lay out what the policy actually was. And they say Sweden's disease control measures have largely been based on a voluntary approach and the responsibility of each individual. The commission considers that the focus on recommendations which people are expected to follow voluntarily has been fundamentally correct. So they stand by the policy at the end of the day. They've got some caveats which we'll get into later. But then at the end they also mentioned that the Swedish healthcare system managed to adapt rapidly and was for the most part able to offer care to those falling ill with COVID-19. One of the things that you hear a lot about when we talk about the voluntary nature of Sweden's approach is that maybe it worked for Sweden because there's something cultural there that people are more willing to do the research. It's a responsible thing. Can you talk to that point? Is that an aspect of Swedish culture that made it work particularly well there? I think it's worth investigating and researching whether this is a factor. For sure there's more of a high degree of social trust in Sweden trust in your neighbors and in the government than in other places. So perhaps it's enough with recommendations then people will just follow the recommendation you don't need the ban. That's one possible argument. On the other hand I think it's interesting to see what happened during the pandemic in Sweden compared to other places because trust doesn't come from nowhere. I mean it's also the result of how you behave, how authorities behave. And Sweden is actually one of few countries where we see an increased trust in the public health agency in many of the people who led the Swedish COVID response. And we also saw more of trust in things like medical interventions, vaccines. We didn't get the same kind of anti-vax movement in Sweden as we did in other places. So perhaps it's a bit of a chicken and an egg problem. Perhaps it's the case that we didn't have a public health authority that with the force of the police and government legislation and bans forced people to behave in a certain way. That actually made us trust those authorities more than you do in other places where sometimes it's just sort of the individual preferences of some of these experts and agencies that suddenly ruins your everyday lifestyle. Then it's easy to lack trust in that system. Was there any anti-vax movement actually before this arose in Sweden? Because one thing that I'm thinking about is how like the US to some degree had a strong history of vaccine refusal, vaccine dissenters, starting in the 90s and early aughts, especially with like the Andrew Wakefield study. And Britain also had the same thing. So I could imagine that perhaps the reason why that didn't crop up in Sweden is maybe because it wasn't already there. Do you have any insight there just really briefly? Yeah, that could be. Swedes love vaccines. Just give it to me and we do it. That could be this general trust in authorities, in medical authorities. This might have been a high rate of autism, no? One interesting thing though is that it's always been voluntary to go and get vaccines in Sweden. We have other places in Italy, for example, where it's mandatory, traditional sort of childhood vaccines and so on. And that leads to distrust in vaccines in Italy, or at least it's much higher than it is in Sweden. So I also think this sensitivity, this being open to the fact that if you really don't want to do something you don't have to, that gives people, you're more relaxed about things, even authorities. You know, to that point, it's also interesting. Sweden seems to have been more willing than the United States to acknowledge the different risk that different populations face from the virus, namely not closing schools at all. It seems like in terms of mask mandates in schools, that was not a big thing. Even on vaccines, I noticed right here that Sweden is not even recommending vaccines for kids age 5 to 11. And this is the kind of thing that is extremely still controversial in the United States, but there's a more sort of careful analysis, it seems to me, of subpopulations and their relative risks. What do you think explains that? Well, I'm going to have to ask why American authorities don't think about things in the same way, because it seems quite reasonable. If you're doing certain non-medical interventions because you want to protect people and society, you'd better know how to protect them and who is most at risk. Otherwise, you risk losing sight of the real problems, but you also risk unintended consequences. This was one of the reasons why Sweden never shut down schools. It was the sense that children aren't severely affected, didn't seem like they spread the virus as much as adults. In that case, if we shut down schools, we're going to ruin their education and social integration for months. And that might be worse than what happens to them if they catch the virus. So to me, it just seems like a reasonable thing to do, and you have to ask why American authorities don't think the same way. This is something that's sort of close to our hearts, and I would imagine at this point, our live stream viewers might be a little bit sick of our slight fixation on this, but I mean, I have a baby and Zach has three young children. And so to some degree, I kind of want to linger on the impact that U.S. policymaking surrounding coronavirus had on young children, because I mean, it just seems absolutely crazy to me that the population, least at risk of terrible consequences, ended up in many ways being the most hurt by this. And so looking at policies like Sweden's, the fact that primary school children were still able to interact with each other and be unmasked and play outside and all of these things. I mean, I live in New York City where we literally had playgrounds being padlocked. So I think it's actually, you know, although our viewers might at this point be sick of us building on this, I just think that this is a really crucial thing to hammer home. I did want to ask Johan. So one thing that I noticed in the clip that Zach had just pulled up is a little bit of the Swedish authorities, the Swedish health authorities touting the healthcare system and talking about how, you know, the Swedish healthcare system managed to adapt rapidly and was for the most part, able to offer care to those falling ill with COVID-19. Although this required significant sacrifices, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you have any thoughts on this? Because I feel like Swedish healthcare system, there are a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters in the United States who tout this as the ideal. How did the Swedish healthcare system handle COVID? And do you have any complicating factoids to draw in that might persuade some Sanders types from either supporting the Swedish system or wanting to emulate socialized medicine in the United States? Yeah, that's a good question because as many... It's a long way to Sweden and it's easy to misunderstand how the system works. Sweden doesn't have a national single payer healthcare system. Like some other countries, it's based on the regions, the 20 plus Swedish regions. They're in charge of it and most of the funding comes from the regional taxes, which is a flat tax, regional and local income taxes rather than anything else. And it's also been changed over the past three decades because it didn't work that well when it was all sort of regional public hospitals and healthcare workers. It's been opened up to private providers and many of... And it's also... You get the same kind of funding if you're a private and accepted private provider of healthcare and that means that there's more flexibility in the system than it was before. And this is something that other countries with a national single payer system, they said that this is a reason why Sweden will not adapt very well to the pandemic because it's not controlled top-down, it's got all these moving parts and also so many groups, institutions that couldn't be easily controlled, but actually turned out that this made it easier to adapt and rapidly scale up things like intensive care units, which was doubled in a very short time. So we never hit the ceiling, we never had more patients than hospital beds. As many of these models where you just extrapolated how many... 20 to 30 patients would be fighting over every single hospital bed. That never happened in Sweden. We even had a big field hospital built not far from here in Stockholm and to receive all those patients, but journalists waited in vain afterwards outside because it never had to open because the normal institutions could rapidly scale up. Yeah, and we're going to get to some of the projections in a little bit which were off worldwide, but specifically in Sweden what was projected versus the actual outcome. But first, I do want to return for a second to the media coverage because I think it's an important component to examine because 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 54,5,420 deaths, which is 40% more than the US per million people, 12 times more than Norway, 7 times more than Finland, 6 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 suffering 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, okay? 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 7th, 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 we don't know, I think, 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 except 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. And 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, 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 okay if everybody did the same mistake. Then you could 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 lock-down policy. And Sweden was the one place where that didn't happen. 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, you know, they would be the ones to blame if things went wrong. But what they were saying all the time is that it isn't us who've 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. Well, 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 me, interruption, but the thing that I think is so interesting about this is also that, like, China had an especially just astonishingly intense lockdown, you know, neighborhood level enforcers going door to door. And, you know, these mandatory quarantines that made it so in many cases you had families trapped in their apartments, sort of, you know, 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, like, not all lockdowns are structured the same. And, like, 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, like, 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, you know, 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. You know, if you were comparing it to the United Kingdom or Italy at that time, it's not going to look, it's not going to 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. 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 that 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 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. 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 cannot 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. And that's a reason why a 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 going to have to look at domestic abuse. You have to look at suicide or loss of exercise and social adaptation in schools, in friendship circles and so on. Yeah, that move from recommendations to mandates and force was definitely one of the most disturbing aspects of how things played out here. And we had people writing opinion pieces for the New York Times saying things like, persuasion is overrated. We can't afford to do this kind of stuff anymore. But speaking of those technocrats, let's examine how well some of their predictions about Sweden held up. And one kind of the premier example really is this Imperial College of London model, which that was the Neil Ferguson's operation that project, these were the projections that policy makers around the world were using to determine what kind of policy to implement. And what they predicted for Sweden, I just pulled some of the numbers from their projections. And again, as always, our sources are linked in the description of the video and at reason.com. But in green here, this is their range of predictions if Sweden social distanced the whole population using a lockdown strategy, the total deaths they projected between about 30,000 and 42,000. In red, this is the unmitigated strategy. If Sweden doesn't do lockdowns, which is the policy they pursued, they're projecting between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths in Sweden. The reality here, I pulled from the WHO's COVID-19 dashboard. By the way, this projection was for July 1st. So deaths by July 1st, 2020. Deaths by July 2nd, 2020 were 14,633. So about half of the projection with a mitigation strategy. And then the total death rate was, I think not even 30,000 at the end of the day from COVID-19. Continuing through like putting Sweden in the context of other countries, this is from your policy paper, a slide that I pulled you on. We see Sweden's COVID death rate is pretty much in the middle of the pack when you take all of Europe and the US into account with 2,322 deaths per million. And then this was the really striking one. You'll see Sweden at the very bottom of this chart because Sweden's excess death rate during the pandemic was the lowest in Europe. What do we take from this fact right here? Do we have any theories as to why Sweden actually had fewer excess deaths than the rest of the continent? Yeah, this is a shocker that those numbers. And it tells you, first of all, I think that don't put too much trust in models like that because they can't really make a serious forecast because it was all based on just two options. Shutting down societies or just business as usual and everybody lives exactly like they did before the pandemic, they didn't have room for people actually on a voluntary basis doing things like working from home, trying to avoid public transportation if they could and so on. So that's obviously a major factor behind this data. And then when it comes to total excess deaths over the three pandemic years compared to the three previous years, the fact that Sweden actually had the lowest accrued excess death rate in Europe and less than half of America's, that comes as a surprise to most people. And let me just say that you can adjust those numbers in different ways according to the years you compare it to, age structure, health structure in the population. According to some ways of doing this Denmark beats us to first place, but we're almost the lowest excess death rates much lower than countries like Finland, for example who seem to be doing better during the pandemic. So it tells you that it's not necessarily this dramatic trade off between liberty and health. I do think one other thing that we should throw in there because Zach and I were doing some research on this in preparing for this, but the median age, given that we know that COVID is especially higher mortality for the elderly versus the young one thing we're interested in is okay, could one explanation be that countries with higher excess mortality rates just had really, really old populations and countries that were more successful are just young healthy spry. But in reality, I mean the median age in a lot of parts of Scandinavia, Sweden included and the United States, it's all roughly comparable. And so that's not a variable that is significantly different to some degree. I think US median age is something like 38 and I believe it's the same in Sweden, maybe like 39. And so that is a commonality that I think it's important like to some degree we have sort of controlled for that variable in assessing this. I do want to ask though, so explain more of the political culture and some of the characteristics of Sweden that led to this really, really high success. Like to some degree I almost want to try to learn from this voluntary model. It does also seem, although I like your analysis which is blame Italy a little bit for the spread of the coronavirus in Sweden which I'm totally on board with blaming Italians as much as possible. There is an interesting thing that we should talk about which is that the virus came to Stockholm very, very early on. And so tell me about that experience where coronavirus was coursing through Sweden but to some degree maybe that led to greater herd immunity earlier on before the vaccine was developed. Could you explain that to us? Yeah, that's right. We got it early February and full disclosure I was on a flight from Austria that week as well as family vacation and I got a call from a doctor at one hospital who asked me so were you on that plane in this seat? Yes, I was. Okay, in that case you'd better check your health because I apparently sat next to someone who had the virus. So I didn't get it at that moment in time but many people did that early on and I think it had two effects. Yes, probably more people were affected at an early stage and obviously that can help later on to create some sort of immunity against it but also that it seemed like it was already too late to do anything about it. The virus was already here whereas some other countries like Norway and Denmark thought that, okay it might be heading our way let's just shut everything down for a month or so and that's why it seemed like Sweden was doing so much worse early on than others. Then there are other aspects of Swedish political culture if you want me to go into that. I think we do want to go into that and I've got a good, there was another clip of Anders Tenjel that I think will broach that topic because Liz and I were watching this and it just struck us sort of he's talking about herd immunity which we just discussed a little bit and his tone in discussing Sweden's policy approach, his humility was kind of interesting and a contrast to what we often experience here so let's run that other Tenjel clip, Adam. Can you regard a situation in which your country has getting on for 30,000 infections of COVID-19 in the population as a death toll which is significantly higher than your neighbors standing at around 3,500 can you regard that as success or do you have to acknowledge that in some ways your strategy failed? Yeah, that's true, when it comes to the death toll this didn't work out the way we hoped it on the other hand I mean the connection between our basic strategy in slowing down the spread if that really in the long run will affect the total death toll in the society or not that is not clear yet, I mean we know that our neighboring countries by now have around 1% of the population who had some kind of immunity has had disease we have at least 10 maybe 20 times higher level of immunity in the population You're inviting me there to consider the long term significance of this notion this concept of herd immunity now your own government says that the strategy that you implemented the more moderate the less strict emergency response to COVID-19 was not about establishing herd immunity but you seem to be suggesting that actually it is about getting to that point where so many people in the general population have had COVID-19 and therefore we can assume have some resistance to getting it again that you have this concept of herd immunity in your population, was that the working strategy or not? No it was not, I'm just pointing out one way that shows that you cannot make this kind of easy comparisons at this stage because the epidemic has hit different countries in many different ways Anthony has pretty humble, pretty measured and like he's actually being honest with people and allowing them to assess what they think of this strategy on their own given the data as well as being pretty clear about the timeframes that we're measuring this is a stark contrast to what we've seen from Anthony Fauci in the United States explain these deeper differences in political culture and how this leads to trust or distrust in institutions This is very interesting because I think that here Sweden is the outlier and it's partly a result of the kind of division of powers that exist in government in government in Sweden so a person like Tengel and the Public Health Authority in Sweden is not as politicized as they are in other places it's not like the president appoints his sort of top health expert and then he's supposed to sort of be almost a politician having an agenda and defending it whatever happens to data and whatever happens to the world those health authorities, other government agencies in Sweden are supposed for hundreds of years to be fairly independent it's always a good thing but it might be in certain instances because it often means that they don't have to play politics so the boss of an agency is appointed by the government but on a longer mandate he's not replaced when there's a new government in town a new prime minister which means that they're supposed to be less about a political agenda more about following the law and following the data wherever it goes and this means that Tengel doesn't have to defend any particular ideology or a political program or anything like that he tells you what he thinks the reading of the science is and then the government is of course free to follow that advice or reject it but by tradition they usually come pretty close and my suspicion is that one reason is that if everything fails they can blame Tengel for it, whereas that would be much more difficult in a system where they directly they're part of the government but is there a mechanism by which you can remove these public health authorities like how does that work if say Tengel had performed terribly does being so insulated from political pressures have a negative unintended consequence of making it hard for the citizenry to fire them he can be fired if the government thinks that they are really doing a lousy job they can throw them out but that's the one thing they can do they cannot intervene and sort of tell them constantly what to do, what to say here and there you go, off you go and that rarely happens then you really have to misbehave in dramatic ways so this has given traditionally then government agencies some independence is to stand free from the political agenda and that's not always a good thing because you know many government agencies are filled with people who are just obsessed with one problem and never thinks about cost benefits and unintended consequences but there's a lot of historical coincidence that wasn't the case this time around and I think once in a while it's important when politicians panic because we could see this that the Norwegian and Danish health authorities they were closer to the Swedish agenda the Swedish model than their politicians were but since they don't have that division of powers Danish and Norwegian politicians are actually doing something drastically so they shut down borders and shut down schools even though the health experts said this will just hurt us in other ways and it won't help us against the virus this is a drum we still speak, oh go ahead Zach well I was just gonna say you know in that answer also you can kind of see why other public health officials are not as forthcoming about admitting mistakes in that answer he says yes we did some things wrong and we wouldn't we don't want to see the death toll as high as it is and then the way that that was twisted and reported around the world was to say Tenjell admits that Sweden's anti-lockdown strategy didn't work and anyone who watches that clip that clip that we just played in its full context can see that's not what he's saying that unfortunately the virus we were not aggressive enough in protecting these care centers that was a big mistake and we're going to go into some of the errors in a second here but could you just comment on the way that kind of that exchange was used against Sweden in the big picture this was nuts and I was actually very surprised when I talked to American and European friends who said that oh you've apparently abandoned your strategy and apologized for it, what how and it turned out that many journalists had been using clips like that by Tenjell and others the prime minister even the Swedish king when they said that yes obviously the high death toll it's a failure that was a problem but then moving on to say that we still think it's the best strategy we think of the long run this will turn out to be a better way of doing things and children won't be suffering learning losses and things like that and yet it was reported in the Washington Post and the telegraph and so on that sort of Tenjell the COVID strategy regrets not imposing lockdowns and Tenjell obviously rejected all those interpretations so that tells you how we became just a symbol of something that the rest of the world didn't like and they wanted to see it fail this is almost like a lesson in how the foreign media works like the foreign media's heads just exploded when faced with a public official who was actually indicating some amount of humility and really that should be kind of a routine thing where you know that's very easy to incorporate into our existing hypotheses about how the world works but instead it was just like you know completely impossible to comprehend for that which is kind of a sad commentary on like the sorry state of affairs in the United States at least. Yeah and that tells you that Tenjell isn't a politician but a politician knows that if he ever uses the word mistake that will be the one thing that they all talk about but he is more humble scholar and he says it like it is and I think that's I mean that's often problematic for him but I think that's incredibly important when we evaluate the different models we have to be it's okay to make mistakes we all make mistakes it's always a mystery of discovery and of learning and the tragic thing is that so many health agencies and specifically politicians and governments they don't want to revisit what happened because they don't want to admit any kind of mistakes and in that case we're not learning anything until the next time. Yeah and that you know the excerpt we read from the the Sweden's internal COVID commission at the beginning made it very clear that the lockdown or the anti-lockdown strategy was a mistake they do analyze some of the errors and I want to go through a couple of those major errors that they pinpoint and ask you if you agree or disagree one is that they say there should have been more active reception arrangements put in place for people returning from winter break so this goes back to the Italy problem for example vacationing in Italy they're saying when they should have when they came back to Stockholm or wherever and develop symptoms there should have been a more obvious path for them to get tested and you know isolate not spread the virus down because it would have been a good thing for the spread to have been a little bit slower at the beginning as we try to as they try to cope with these senior facilities the other note here is that you know they say reiterate here that other countries unlike Sweden introduced various types of lockdown and that they believe the right balance was struck in keeping preschools and compulsory schools open switching to distance learning at colleges however we believe that in the middle of March 2020 there should have been some sort of temporary closures of a number of indoor settings where people gather or come into close contact such as shopping centers restaurants cultural and sports events hairdressings along swimming pools and the like so reading that it does sound to me that this commission and I don't know exactly who is behind it but that they do think there should have been some sort of temporary lockdown here in the US call lockdowns and you know my concern reading that is you know what is temporary we saw what temporary lockdowns were like here but you know what is your reaction to kind of their recommendations as to what could have been done better Yeah I think that obviously some things could have been done better but I think that didn't work out was having testing in place at an early stage and you know I mentioned that I was on a flight and I got this call that perhaps I should try to stay at home if I could because I might be infected I wasn't offered a test at that time because they hadn't scaled that up and I mean many countries suffered from the same problem to get an indication of whether I should really isolate myself and protect my loved ones from myself for example however I don't agree with and I think there are other things like that I think that elderly care homes could have been protected better from an early stage but I don't agree with this assessment that we should have shut down all these places the Corona Commission is an independent commission made up of different experts in different fields and they think that they can calibrate and find the exact right way of lockdown and making it very temporary at that moment I should say that there were restrictions in place gatherings were public events were limited to 50 participants in March for example public ones only right like people were still able to host private events so people were still able to get married and have religious services, have funerals the types of family events private gatherings were okay workplace shopping centres that was not included so there were some things like that when you went to a bar you had to get a table you couldn't stand in the bar and talk and create this kind of crowd effect so there were some things like that in place I think it is very easy for experts afterwards to look at the exact state of the transmission and how everything turned out for these few weeks alone it would have made sense to shut this particular thing down but that doesn't tell you anything how such an attempt would have worked out at that stage whether you would have it in the right places at the right time and whether you would open it up at the right moment which most places countries didn't do I mean this is like that's a really good point and I was just going to linger on the elder care homes issue because that seems to be what everyone agrees on is that this happened in New York City this just swept through nursing homes and that was in part because of a deliberate policy by the governor of that state to send infected seniors into nursing home facilities in Sweden I was looking to this issue just a little bit and this issue of Science Magazine as Gamble alleges that the hospitals in Sweden didn't become as overwhelmed as those in Northern Italy or New York City but that was in part because many severely ill patients weren't hospitalized a directive to Stockholm area hospitals stated patients older than 80 with a BMI above 40 shouldn't be admitted to intensive care because they were less likely to recover most nursing homes were not equipped to administer oxygen so many residents instead received morphine to alleviate their suffering that kind of complicates the conversation we were having earlier about Sweden's healthcare system it almost seems like they were taking a very heavy handed triage approach do you know much about what happened in the hospital system or have any context that you can add to that well you know it's not that it's difficult to say that there was one directive that told everybody how to do since the system is more decentralized and there were various different ways of doing things in different places but yes obviously and I've talked to doctors about this obviously in many cases when people were very old having very severe pre-existing conditions they didn't administer intensive care and ventilators and things like that not for lack of ventilators because again we had an excess capacity even at the peak of some 20% but because it's a very difficult and painful intervention and if you think that this won't help at all then doctors they don't perform those things and I don't reject the idea that mistakes were being made I don't have knowledge about that but it's not that easy to just say that they sort of have had this brutal triage instead one mistake that have been done and this will hopefully change in the future is that we have a very bizarre form of local regional division of powers which means that the nursing homes and the elderly care homes even for the old they're administered by controlled by cities whereas all the health care and the hospitals is based in the regions and this means that we've even had some bizarre rules saying that nursing homes are not allowed to hire a medical doctor because that is what regions do so we had those silly almost tough wars between them and obviously that hurt a lot of people in elderly care but again look at the whole picture of total excess deaths over all those three years if Sweden willingly sacrificed human life as if they were old and had a high BMI that would show in the statistics and we wouldn't have the lowest excess death rates of all European countries. In a sense it seems like the approach that was being used is not like a Ari Aster horror movie mid-summer throwing the old people off of a cliff type approach though that is very Scandinavian I hear but rather a palliative care type approach where I mean fundamentally we're talking about people over the age of was it 80? I mean that's very very old who are obese and I think to some degree this is something that I don't think would play very well in the United States but a palliative care approach does I think and I think that's something that's been in the palliative sense and I'm curious at some point we should go into that and examine that more deeply. As I mentioned at the top of the show our reason for continuing to stage these conversations about COVID policy even as the most harsh measures are in the rear view mirror is just to better understand what actually unfolded and what the real lessons are being absorbed by many of the policy makers in this country or the influential media figures who write and talk about COVID. I haven't heard any acknowledgement from the people who implemented them that lockdowns were a mistake that school closures were a mistake much less any apologies I don't hear that that Anders Teniel approach to things so I don't think it makes sense for any of us to drop it until it becomes crystal clear that we're not doing this again at Johan am I off base here do you think the proper lessons are actually being drawn from Sweden's example like what if you had to boil it down what are the lessons that should be learned. Yeah no you are right the proper lessons are not being learned partly because few people and especially politicians and authorities they want to revisit the pandemic because they did things out of panic quite often and they want the perception to remain that we didn't have an alternative of course we made mistakes but we didn't have an alternative and Sweden is the counter argument that they don't like because there was an alternative and it's so shocking to me to see the interest in Sweden during the pandemic we've never had international reporting about Sweden as we did of the first year of the pandemic and then silently that was all quiet and journalists stopped calling they said that we were a disaster a pariah the world's cautionary tale but afterwards when we have the results why don't they revisit and follow up and look at the data that's what we need to do because again we we make mistakes no more than humans but we have to learn from those mistakes and make sure that this is a learning process and what other what should we learn from the Swedish experience I think it is that don't panic don't do just anything against any kind of problem whatever it is even if it seems like the worst problem there don't accept any kind of legislation and control and measures because there are always cost benefits there are always unintended consequences and we have to take that into consideration as well. So Americans almost have this weird fixation on Scandinavia you know I mean in on this topic we want to use Sweden as the scapegoat but then in a bunch of other political contexts in the United States we despite not knowing very much about what is being pretty naive about Sweden seem to want to emulate it. I think that the most interesting example of this switching gears a little bit is Bernie Sanders. So Bernie Sanders will so frequently call himself a democratic socialist and tout socialism as the model he doesn't mean Venezuela style socialism he doesn't mean Cuban style socialism he means Swedish socialism this is something you have commented on really Johann what are the myths that Americans my age believe about the Swedish system is it actually socialist it's so interesting that socialists keep coming back to Sweden and I think that's because all their favorite countries constantly fail every Cuban Venezuela end up with bread lines and millions trying to escape from that that horror show but they always think Sweden it seems so friendly and successful and yet socialist well the problem of course is that we have been socialists in Sweden and we have been successful but never at the same time that's what Sanders and the others fail to realize we had that period in the 1970s and 1980s when Sweden was doubling the size of public consumption raising taxes raising everything and price controls and what have you and this is the moment when Bernie Sanders and all those who are sort of stuck in the 1970s this is what they still remember look at Sweden they are socialists but they're also one of the richest countries on the planet it seems to be working in Sweden the problem of course is that it's like that old joke how do you end up with a small fortune well you start with a large fortune and then you waste most of it and that's what Sweden did in the 70s and 80s we were one of the richest countries on the planet before this experiment and that was based on a 100 year period of limited government free markets free trade as late as 1960 we had lower taxes than the United States in most European countries this brought us all the wealth and all those successful international companies the IKEA's and stuff that brought us so much wealth that politicians thought that they could redistribute everything and begin to just jack up spending and taxes well they couldn't because the 70s and 80s that's the one period in modern Swedish economic history when we lagged behind other countries this is the moment when we didn't create a single net job in the private sector and when entrepreneurs and businesses left Sweden IKEA left Sweden, Tetra Pak left Sweden most successful entrepreneurs left because it was impossible to do business in Sweden and this all ended in a terrible financial crash in the early 1990s so that was a brief period of time and it's one that we don't want to go back to in Sweden not even Swedish socialists even they say that okay we went too far and the Social Democratic Finance Minister at the time said Sweden was actually absurd and perverse in many ways what we were trying to do and since then Sweden has again become successful but that's based on a new period of liberalisation and of economic reform so today if Bernie Sanders wanted to imitate Sweden he would have to reform Social Security partially privatise it he would have to open up and privatise much of the markets, deregulate, abolish occupational licensing reduce many taxes, reduce corporate taxes from the US level, abolish property taxes and inheritance taxes and stuff like that implement a national school voucher system so private schools get the same funding as public ones so Sweden today is not what he remembers from the 1970s it's a much better and freer place than it was back then. In a lot of ways this almost feels a little bit like a libertarian paradise not on every level but I certainly look at obviously Sweden has some areas that absolutely fly in the face of that like I know homeschooling is banned in Sweden which is very sad but school choice is massive in Sweden and then when you look at yes there's a whole bunch of public sector jobs a whole bunch of government jobs programs but one thing that's actually really interesting that I know you've commented on a fair bit is the fact that union relations in Sweden are a lot less fraught than in the United States so in the United States you so frequently see teachers unions and cop unions essentially allowing some of the worst lowest performing employees to fester in these roles to never be fired to have perpetual constant eternal job security completely shielded from the consequences of their laziness without actions. You see a ton of political power exercised by unions in the United States. Is this different in Sweden? It seems like it's a little bit less toxic. You know relations in workplaces aren't as confrontational in Sweden as it is in most other places and I would say the trade unions are more respected in Sweden broadly than in other places but as one is a great conversation between two trade unionists an American and a sweet when the Americans said oh we would love to have the kind of respect and attention and power as you do in Sweden and the Swedish trade unionists said in that case you have to deserve it and that's one major difference and this shocks Americans. The Swedish trade unions one of their most important goals is to make sure that wage increases aren't too high aren't too they don't get too high wages because that will make their businesses less competitive so the sort of the trade union federation is traveling around the country and trying to sort of get the local trade unions to relax don't try to get everything at once because we're a small open economy we have to stay competitive and make sure that wages don't increase faster than productivity and that's obviously not the same trade unions as you see in other places. Some explain this with the fact that we have much higher trade union membership rates in Sweden than in other places. 70-80% even in white collar professions and some economists like Manko Olsson has pointed out if your trade unions are represent such a large part of the population then you can't just get everything on everybody else's expense in that case you have to think about the competitiveness of the whole economy. You're also a consumer so it doesn't make sense to lobby for tariffs for example. So many things are different in Sweden than in the US. I think it's worth playing with this bit of Bernie Sanders rhetoric just to really dig into a couple of the specific claims that he makes when he touts the Swedish DSA model let's roll that clip and I'm curious to hear you react to some of the specifics that he draws from. Is it really possible for someone who calls himself a socialist to be elected president of the United States? Well so long as we know what democratic socialism is and if we know that in countries like Norway, Sweden, they are very democratic countries obviously their voter turnout is a lot higher than it is in the United States in those countries health care is a right of all people in those countries college education, graduate school is free in those countries retirement benefits, childcare are stronger than in the United States of America and in those countries by and large government works for ordinary people in the middle class rather than as is the case right now in our country for the billionaire. I can hear the Republican tech ad right now he wants America to look more like Scandinavia. That's right. That's right. And by the way that was from ABC this week in 2015 when Bernie was running for president and some of the things he mentioned there, turnout more generous social safety net, free college more general equality you mentioned some of the free market. Yes, yes. So is that something that is crucial to Sweden's society and kind of cultural success? You know this is why Sweden is not a libertarian paradise we might have free markets but we do have a very generous welfare state and it's true that many of these things are handed out by the government not always it's funded by the government at least often there are private providers but the thing is we pay for these things ourselves that's an incredibly important point to make because you know there's this pipe dream of Bernie Sanders and others that this will somehow be paid for by the rich but Sweden learned in the 1970s that you can pick one a big generous welfare state or you can make the rich pay for it all you can't have both if you have a universal generous welfare states and make the rich pay for it all they will stop being rich they will move they will stop starting those businesses and the ideas of the future will move again instead you have to get taxes from low and middle income households that's the dirty little secret of the Swedish welfare state that the socialists love the poor taxpayers because they are reliable loyal taxpayers they don't dodge they don't move to Monaco they don't have tax attorneys so we have the bulk of our government revenue coming from regional local income taxes our flat income taxes not progressive and even the sort of the national level kicks in among fairly fairly unfairly low incomes also things like a value added tax at 25% in general on most goods which is obviously regressive the poor pay as much as the rich when they buy food in taxes and this means that the LCD club of mostly rich countries look at different tax systems around the world they say that the Swedish system is one of the least progressive tax systems of all much less progressive than the United States because America's welfare states is so small so you can rely more on the rich whereas here we all have to pay for it so the Swedish welfare state distributes over an individual's life cycle we get lots of stuff when we're young and in preschool and school and then we work hard and pay for it all and then we get much of it back in healthcare and retirement benefits which mostly means that yes we get lots of stuff but we pay for it all and it means that nothing much is different from paying it straight out of pocket and then the fact that we only get it back when and if the government decides that this is a valuable thing this is how you should spend your money Do you think that Norway will at any point adopt the Swedish model because I know Norway does it a little bit differently but they've experienced huge issues with capital flight in recent years it's a little bit of a stereotype at this point having multi-millionaires and billionaires fleeing Scandinavia to go to like Switzerland for less avoidance reasons will Norway emulate Sweden because the Swedish system is more successful Well that's a we as Swedes would love to see that happening sorry that's the cat she always you know cats are nature's arch-individualists as Albert J. Nock put it so if there's a recent discussion she wants to be a part of it so as Swedes we would love to see our Scandinavians neighbors realize that we did it the best way all this time actually the Danes are according to economic freedom of the world more free market than the Swedes the Norwegians aren't and you know they have oil and that makes all the difference because they get so much government revenue from oil so if your policy is to strike oil then a more generous welfare state with less free markets might be sustainable for a longer period of time How does the welfare the large welfare state affect sort of the social issues because that's often where we see things get there's often a correlation there where when the welfare state becomes more generous people for instance what less immigration because they see outsiders as coming in and taking their benefits away how is that how have issues like that played out in Sweden Yes this is I think my main fear when it comes to this generous welfare state it's not really what it costs but what it buys and the kind of attitudes that change with it in several ways you know we have a traditional work ethic in Sweden and a tradition of trying to be honest in relationships with government agencies and so on which goes hundreds of years back in time long time before we had a welfare state or long time before we were rich even which I think and this goes too far to discuss here but I think it goes back to the fact that Sweden was never a feudal society self owning property owning small farmers instead and that affects attitudes well once you but so cultures come from a certain place and when you remove those incentives and change the system it might erode some of these attitudes and we've seen some worrying things about like that in in polling how Swedes are subtle suddenly think it's okay to lie and get government benefits something that my grandparents generation think would be would be absolutely horrible we do see some changes in the work ethic in in certain areas of society and we definitely see a rise of nationalist sentiments you know we yes we want a generous welfare state but we don't want to share it with Somalians and with the Afghanistan's nice and we've seen the rise of a 20% far right party in Sweden which has quite a sway over our policy right now in Sweden so things change once you begin to play around with these social attitudes well this is a thing that I think about so much and this is the flip side of it that I think many self-described democratic socialists in the United States won't recognize but I mean Sweden has much lower poverty than the United States does and frankly less liberal less welcoming policy toward immigrants and even of its Nordic neighbors Sweden is far and away in my understanding the most welcoming to immigrants and even even at that it's really it doesn't have nearly the same levels of immigration that the United States does I mean I think there's something like what I mean single digits in most Nordic countries are actually foreign born and then I look around my home New York City and we're about 40% foreign born this is just your society and your welfare state will be structured so differently based off of how relaxed you are how welcoming you are toward immigrants and I think this is something that so much of the progressive left in the US feels to reconcile the fact that like if you actually want the Nordic system to be emulated do you want that part of it to be emulated too because that really has to be dealt with a little bit more do you have any reactions to that in terms of that trade off between welfare state and immigration do you think Sweden should be approaching that differently? You know this is so interesting people can be absolutely devoted to the ideals of equality and we should almost all of us have exactly the same kind of income level and lifestyle and then the moment you mention Nigeria or you mention Iraq then suddenly they say obviously not on that level it should be sort of just us here we should have perfect equality and that tells you something about how little universal they are in their frame of reference and of mind and how really discriminatory some of these policies are and interestingly I think this is one area where Bernie Sanders has talked about how ideals about open borders and free migrations that's dangerous to socialism that's more like a Koch brothers idea because it would be impossible in the long run to welcome everybody and if we also want this kind of generous welfare state and this is the paradox this is what we're seeing right now with the reaction in not just Nordic countries but all over Europe I think to this generation the government doesn't say and Swedes nowadays don't tell people ask people so what kind of life would you prefer what kind of set of institutions and benefits would you prefer they say you want the best you want access to government funded pre-school and school and health care you want all this stuff because we can't accept anything less for you and oh that's so expensive so we can't accept you so you're gonna have to stay in a place in often ruthless despotic dictatorships with no chance of improving the lives of yours and your loved ones and this to me is one of the most stark illustrations of the hypocrisy of the socialist ideals perfect equality within those walls and you don't let anybody in yeah it's really frankly quite tragic Johan Norberg thank you so much for talking to us I hear you have a new book out the capitalist manifesto and where can people find that book where can people find you if they want to keep following your work well they can I think the best way is just to google Johan Norberg and you can add something like the Kato Institute and then you'll find most of my stuff and the and the book as well but I'm everywhere on social media if you just look for Johan Norberg wonderful thank you so much for talking to reason this was truly enlightening and I apologize to our viewers but Zach and I will continue to be chronicling some of the abject policy failures of the covid era for a while longer because it's important to learn from these mistakes thank you so much