Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Calls for an inquiry into Australia’s Covid-era abuses have intensified with revelations that Australia saw more excess deaths than Sweden, and at a much higher financial cost.

The one thing you weren’t allowed to say during the Covid era is the one thing that could have spared thousands of lives and Australia’s current cost-of-living crisis: look to Sweden.

The Swedish approach always made more sense for a virus with an overall infection mortality rate of 0.15% (not 3.4% as originally reported), and which posed effectively no threat to the young and otherwise healthy.

The ‘Swedish Model’ involved no strict lockdowns, no school closures, no travel restrictions, voluntary distancing, limited mask usage, protection of vulnerable groups — and therefore, minimal impact on the economy.

In short, Swedish authorities rejected punitive and draconian measures in favour of individual responsibility, trusting that people would make wise and caring decisions to self-isolate if they were infected with the virus.

For years, Sweden was vilified as a ‘pariah state’ by a Covid-giddy media for its measured approach to the virus.

By contrast, the Daily Declaration published dozens of articles praising Sweden for upholding human rights while the rest of the Western world went mad.

Excess Deaths in Sweden Versus Australia

Now the results are in.

During the Covid era, Australia’s federal and state governments spent more than $400 billion to offset the damage inflicted by lockdowns, as reported last week by the Australian Financial Review.

The Australian also reports:

According to the IMF, Australia’s gross public debt as a share of GDP surged from 47 per cent to 59 per cent between 2019 and 2022, mainly as a result of federal and state stimulus programs that accompanied lockdowns, while Sweden’s public debt declined from 39 per cent to 31 per cent.

And yet, for all that cost, we still saw more excess deaths than Sweden. According to a recent OECD analysis, Australia experienced a 3.7% rise in excess deaths between 2020 and 2021, compared to Sweden’s 3.6%.

Reporting on the study, The Australian highlighted that adding in excess deaths for the year 2022 “puts Australia even further behind Sweden with an 8.2 per cent increase over the three-year period compared with Sweden’s 3.1 per cent”.

“If you control for population growth [higher in Australia], Australia’s excess deaths rate over the three-year period as a whole was 2.1 per cent and in Sweden it was -0.6 per cent, that is no excess mortality,” OECD spokesperson Stefano Scarpetta told The Australian.

Another OECD data analysis suggests an ever greater disparity during 2020 to 2022, with 6.7% excess deaths in Sweden, compared with 18% in Australia.

An Inquiry That Asks the Hard Questions

The Australian Financial Review’s economics editor John Kehoe last week called for a COVID-19 inquiry that will “ask the hard questions”.

“Amid community complaints about high inflation and cost-of-living pressures, not many punters have realised that lockdowns and over-stimulus during the pandemic are directly responsible,” he wrote.

Kehoe listed some of the dismal realities brought on by Australian governments that refused to listen to common sense and their citizens’ repeated cries for mercy:

Some businesses were forced to cut production, or close overnight.

Too much stimulus-fuelled consumer demand clashed against a restricted supply of goods and services.

With the benefit of hindsight, the consequence is high inflation and eroding living standards…

Locally, there has been a worrying spike in mental health issues, with feelings of depression, anxiety and stress all trending conspicuously higher in 2022 compared to the start of the pandemic, according to the Australian Unity wellbeing index.

Deaths due to COVID and non-COVID are way up, including due to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke and dementia. Missing and delaying medical appointments and procedures during lockdowns has literally cost thousands of lives, with the full effects yet to be seen…

Some of the more draconian measures, such as locking people in their homes 23 hours a day in Victoria, were an obscene breach of people’s basic human rights for what was a mild pandemic compared to more lethal viruses such as the Spanish flu 100 years earlier.

There was never a deep understanding among COVID-19 zealots about the trade-offs and opportunity costs of shutting down society and ringing up huge federal and state debts.

The Young Paid the Highest Price

Any inquiry that takes place, Kehoe insists, must measure not just excess deaths but also the number of life-years lost. He quotes former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth as saying, “The community has to accept there is a difference between a 90-year-old dying and a 19-year-old dying.” Kehoe continues:

The average age of people who died with COVID-19 in Australia was about 85, two years above life expectancy.

Yet state premiers locked young healthy people in their homes and outside of state borders to try to control the spread of the virus.

Lockdowns were never part of the original pandemic playbook prescribed by health authorities. Inexplicably, Western governments copied lockdowns in authoritarian China after the original suspected outbreak in Wuhan.

In Australia, economist Gigi Foster estimates that COVID-19 policies cost the nation’s youth at least 116 times the value of any benefit they could have received from those policies.

“Our response to COVID has served to exacerbate existing social, economic and health inequalities,” Foster writes in a paper for the Centre for Independent Studies, Cohort of losers: generational burden of government Covid response.

An Inquiry is Coming Soon

Health Minister Mark Butler has confirmed to the Australian Financial Review that an inquiry into Australia’s COVID-19 response would happen soon.

“The prime minister and I and other ministers have made it very clear that we intend to hold a deep inquiry into the management of COVID over the last few years,” Butler said, adding, “We’ll announce the terms of that inquiry in due course.”

Kehoe lays out the necessary parameters of such an inquiry:

A credible inquiry must investigate pandemic preparedness, all health advice provided to federal and state governments, lockdowns, border closures, school shutdowns, vaccine procurement and rollouts, economic stimulus measures and the denial of people’s basic human rights.

It is refreshing to finally see serious calls for accountability on Covid-era abuses hailing from mainstream newsrooms.

Far better if, from the outset, independent outlets like the Daily Declaration were taken seriously when endorsing the now-vindicated Great Barrington Declaration and warning against the insanity of lockdowns.

The mistakes made by Australian governments were not just wrong in hindsight: they were wrong at the time, as this outlet argued for years.

For truthful reporting and insightful analysis on future crises, be sure to sign up for the Daily Declaration’s email news. Sign up today and receive a free eBook, The Blessing of Almighty God (RRP $9.95).

Image via Unsplash.