Error made in 'COVID Half as Bad' Substack

Case was overstated

In this recent Substack, I made an error because of ambiguous wording in the report I looked at. If you pull up the study online, and pull up the data supplement, you will find the words “Model Baseline Death Rate” and just next to it “1957 Excess Death Rate” — but don’t be deceived as I first was.

Above those titles is a sectional title showing that the excesses found were ONLY the excesses in respiratory deaths. The actual excess death rate in 1957 in Sweden can be gleaned from applying the same method of 5-year averaging to the year of 1957, and it comes out to only 5.8% excess for the year.

A decade earlier, a nonpandemic flu had hit Sweden, causing an annualized excess death rate of 6.7% excess for the year:

[click to enlarge]

My apologies for getting it wrong. It turns out that, in Sweden, when apples are compared to apples (entire years compared to entire years; using 5-year average baselines each and every time), COVID was 10% worse than the 1947 flu, and 28% worse than the 1957 Asian Flu.

Even still, there was no supra-epidemiological reason to bypass normal safety protocols in vaccine development. COVID was similar to the 1947 flu in Sweden, causing 7.4% excess on a yearly basis which included a prior year (2019) which had a huge (>7.4%) death deficit.