Martin Kulldorff on why lockdowns were a disaster for public health.

Almost as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, governments began locking down. These measures, we were told, might have been insanely authoritarian and historically unprecedented, but politicians were just ‘following the science’. We simply had to give up our freedoms in order to save lives. And yet, in Sweden, ‘the science’ looked very different. The nation refused to go into full lockdown, insisting this would be better for health in the long-run. It made itself a global pariah in the process.

So, four years on from the first lockdowns across the West, has Sweden’s more liberal approach been proven wrong or vindicated? Swedish epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, one of the co-authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss how Sweden fared. They also discussed censorship and the lockdown on dissent during the pandemic. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.