By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

People familiar with respiratory viruses know it is impossible to lock out such viruses by locking down the society. Yet, in virtually all countries, the politicians panicked to such an extent that, two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I dubbed it the COVID-19 panic.

The lockdowns were foolish and illogical. Denmark closed its borders with Germany and Sweden when we had more coronavirus than they had. Golf was forbidden, which led to the absurdity that you were allowed to walk on the fairways if you didn't look like a golfer. Tennis courts were closed, although gatherings of four people were not forbidden. Even outdoor running clubs closed. Life as we knew it stopped, on government orders.

There were early warnings but they were not heeded. After India introduced a lockdown three months into the pandemic, migrant labourers feared that hunger would kill them before the coronavirus did. Ten months into the pandemic, the World Bank estimated that it had caused an increase of about 100 million people living in extreme poverty, and poverty kills.

The pandemic saw a new breed of people who had become experts overnight but knew very little about the issues. They constantly appeared on TV with sinister messages about the need for lockdowns and many other interventions, including dressing whole populations as bank robbers with face masks, although they don't work.

Curiously, governments all over the world preferred to listen to the false gurus rather than to the real experts. I think it was because they supported the official narratives, ideas and dogma, which were flimsily created on the spot by politicians eager to be seen as powerful people who didn't sit on their hands but did something.

The pseudo experts were also loved by the media. I wrote in a newspaper that after a year with the same Danish "expert" on TV, Allan Randrup Thomsen, a laboratory researcher, who was always worried and uttered trifles virtually every day about the pandemic anyone could have said, I needed a new remote control because I had used the mute button so much that it had stopped working. When I asked a TV journalist why they always interviewed Thomsen, he said it was because Thomsen was well prepared as he read what some journalists had written!

Only Sweden had a real expert the politicians listened to and respected, even after a public outrage when mortality figures became rather high in early 2020 compared with the other Nordic countries, which was because Sweden had failed to protect the elderly in the beginning. State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell stood his ground and advised that Sweden should not change its policy, which was to keep the society open and not mandate face masks, which were rarely seen in Sweden.

Sweden was a lone star in the darkness. I think it was the only country that didn't panic and did the right things, and it had the lowest excess mortality in the whole western world during the pandemic (excess mortality is the increase in all-cause mortality during the pandemic compared with prepandemic levels).

The Panickers

The most harmful panickers were researchers from the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at the Imperial College London. The modelling exercises of Neil Ferguson and his team played a preeminent role in shutting down most of the world in early 2020, a couple of months into the pandemic. A year later, historian Phillip Magness wrote that the exaggerated forecasts of this modelling team "may well constitute one of the greatest scientific failures in modern human history."

I agree, and 2020 became the most surreal and shocking year in my whole professional life. The Danish Board of Health claimed it was documented that face masks were effective, which wasn't true, and our government decided to kill all our 17 million mink only because a mutation had been found that might make future vaccines less effective, which was also wrong. In Denmark, we have four pigs for every...