We're now rapidly approaching the six-year anniversary of "15 Days to Slow the Spread."

One of the most disastrous policies in world history, created by "experts" who took all established pre-pandemic planning documents and tossed them out the window at the first opportunity. A policy based on inaccurate reports out of China, who claimed that theirlockdownseffectively stamped out transmission ofCOVID-19within a matter of days. And one that ignored research from established epidemiologists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, which found that the coronavirus had already spread much more widely than previously realized.

Lockdowns and the associatedmask mandates,vaccine passports, and school closures, continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of these policies are quite literally endless. It's not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies and responses quite literally changed the course of world history.

You'd think, then, that there would be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools is necessary to save lives. Yet six years later, there's little interest in examining those questions. And when you see data from Sweden, you can see exactly why.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

A studypublished in PubMedexamined the Swedish approach to COVID policy, relative to its European counterparts. Primarily because Sweden did not rely on lockdowns in response to the pandemic, instead using "voluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations," the study says.

Despite a "majority of Swedes" supporting those policies, "this approach faced rapid and continuous criticism."

That criticism came primarily from public health figures likeDr. Anthony Fauci, who criticized Sweden repeatedly for going against the herd. "You’ve compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences," he said during a Senate Committee hearing in September 2020. "But compare Sweden’s death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. It’s worse. So I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare Sweden with us."

"If you look at Sweden, they are in some trouble," Fauci claimed on Good Morning America in late 2020. "They are starting to see that their death rate is much higher than the surrounding countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland... They’re starting to see now that they’re having to rethink some of the things they did."

This was, of course, not true. They did not "rethink" their strategy of light touch recommendations over lockdowns. And comparing Sweden exclusively to its neighbors is an absurd misdirection that no other country was subjected to. But Fauci, never one for honesty or intellectual integrity, represented many public health figures who wanted Sweden to fail. Yet as this research shows, reality was precisely the opposite.

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