Pandemic Policy Postmortem: Lessons from Sweden

The virus that causes COVID-19 has now become endemic after it first emerged two and a half years ago. In the pandemic’s early days, many countries’ public health officials curtailed economic and social activity to various degrees, prescribed social distancing, enforced lockdowns, required masking, and pushed for other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce illness and death. Those NPIs imposed an enormous economic and social cost by greatly reducing individual liberty in exchange for promised health benefits. Elsewhere, most famously in Sweden, public health officials were fiercely criticized for implementing less‐​harsh “light touch” NPI measures. Sweden’s approach presents a fascinating quasi‐​natural experiment to evaluate the merits and demerits of the more liberal approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic and to evaluate whether the loss in personal and economic freedom was partly compensated by a decrease in illness and death. Sweden’s outcomes on viral spread, excess mortality, and the socioeconomic consequences of COVID-19 compare well with other countries and suggest that strict NPI policies imposed more harm than good.

Joining us to discuss how well Sweden’s approach worked are Jeanne Lenzer, an independent investigative journalist and regular contributor to The BMJ who has studied this issue; Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, an epidemiologist and public health policy analyst who is an associate professor at University of California San Francisco School of Medicine; Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration that urged a pandemic policy of “focused protection”; and Johan Norberg, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who resides in Stockholm, Sweden, and has studied as well as experienced his country’s pandemic policy. The discussion will be moderated by Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey A. Singer.

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