Publisher’s Note: We continue to highlight Sweden’s response to the “coronavirus plandemic,” as Sweden reminds us that nations, cultures and peoples are choosing to navigate this Beast on their own terms. Watch this April 17 2020 interview with Professor Johan Giesecke, high we’ve repurposed from the brilliant Canadian journalist Cory Morningstar. Professor Johan Giesecke is one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists. He is an advisor to the Swedish Government (he hired Anders Tegnell who is currently directing Swedish strategy), the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and an advisor to the director general of the WHO. World Health Organization: “Johan Giesecke trained as an infectious disease clinician in Stockholm, Sweden during the 1980’s, and from his work with AIDS patients he became interested in the epidemiology of infectious diseases. He received an MSc in epidemiology from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1992, and then worked as a Senior Lecturer at the school for a few years. After this he became State Epidemiologist for Sweden (1995 to 2005) and during a one-year sabbatical 1999-2000 he led the group working on the revision of the International Health Regulations at WHO HQ. From 2005 to 2014 he was the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Professor Giesecke has written a textbook on infectious disease epidemiology, and now teaches on this subject as a professor emeritus at the Karolinska Institute Medical University in Stockholm.

Giesecke lays out with typically Swedish bluntness why he thinks:

“The Swedish government decided early in January that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based. And when you start looking around for the measures are being taken now by different countries, you find that very few of them have the shred of evidence based policymaking… like border closures, school closures, and social distancing – there’s almost no science behind most of these.”

“The [Imperial College] paper was never published scientifically. It’s not peer-reviewed which a scientific paper should be. It’s just an internal departmental report for Imperial. And it’s fascinating. I don’t think any other scientific endeavor has made such an impression on the world, as that rather debatable paper.”

“When I first heard, which is now six weeks ago, about the different draconian measures that were taken, I asked myself ‘how are they going to climb down from that one? When will they open the schools again? What would be the criterion to open the schools?’ Did anyone of the strong, and very decisive politicians in Europe, think about how to get out of this when they introduced it? And I think that would be a problem for the UK as well.”

“I think what we’re seeing is a tsunami of a usually quite mild disease, which is sweeping over Europe. And some countries do this, and some countries do that, and some countries don’t do that. And in the end there will be very little difference…. most people who get it will never even notice they were infected.” 

“What am I most afraid of? It’s the dictatorial trends in Eastern Europe. That Orbán is now dictator for Hungary forever. There’s no finishing date. I think the same is popping up in other countries. It may pop up in more established democracies as well. I think the ramifications can be huge from this.” 

Other key takeaways:

– UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based
– The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only
– This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”
– The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better
– The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact
– The paper was very much too pessimistic
– Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway
– The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown
– The results will eventually be similar for all countries
– Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.
– The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%
– At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available.

Thanks again to Canadian journalist Cory Morningstar for this important post.