The idiotic Adam Creighton, who has seemingly been banished from Australia to the US by his Murdoch bosses, put out a Tweet stating:
“’Guess which developed country had the lowest excess mortality between 2020 and 2022: Sweden, which refused to close shops or schools or to impose a mask mandate’.
If that’s true, the humiliation of Team Lockdown is as complete as it is profound.”1
The included quote comes from the Washington Examiner, a very, very conservative newspaper2, for which Creighton provides a link.
Creighton’s idiocy has been the source of amazement here before, firstly, when he pretended he was an epidemiologist3, and then by stating that the overturning of Roe v Wade would infuriate the “authoritarian elitists”4. The irony that the overturning of this would allow a bunch of elite conservative blokes who are in Congress or state legislatures in the US to exert authority over women’s bodies is clearly lost on him.
Now he has gone beyond his previously demonstrated idiocy, in relaying a conservative claim that Sweden has the lowest excess mortality rate among developed countries, and by implication its refusal to shut down shops, schools and impose mask mandates led to fewer deaths from Covid-19. This is a lie.
So far, Australia has had 16,401 die from Covid-19, and that number is increasing by between 100-200 per week5. We have a population of just over 26 million, so that means we have lost about 630 people for every million people. Sweden, on the other hand, has had 21,332 people die from Covid-19. Given that Sweden has a population of just over 10,200,000, that comes to about 2,080 per million population; over three times the death rate in Australia6.
So, for Creighton to state that “Team Lockdown” have been humiliated is simply idiotic. The lockdowns worked well. However, that is not his point. What he is trying to do is to sow doubt in the minds of cookers and other nutters that the lockdowns were necessary to save lives. This is what Murdoch’s ruperters did all throughout lockdowns in 2020, especially in Victoria, which had a Labor government. Research has shown that in the US, lockdowns in the early part of the pandemic, prior to the widespread availability of vaccines, may have saved between 800,000 and 1.5 million lives7. Modelling by the University of Sydney has estimated that Australia’s early response to Covid-19, including lockdowns, may have saved as many as 16,000 lives8.
In his Tweet, Creighton effectively asks if this assertion from the Washington Examiner is true. This makes it clear how significant his limitations as a ‘journalist’ are, as that information is readily available online. It took me a couple of minutes to find it, and clearly shows that Creighton is not interested in facts, just lies, to try to inflame the cookers and to deflect blame from the bastardry exhibited by the Murdoch media during the first two years of the pandemic and subsequently.
Sources
- https://twitter.com/Adam_Creighton/status/1603548982722310145
- https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Washington_Examiner
- https://blotreport.com/2020/03/31/the-ignorance-of-adam-creighton/
- https://blotreport.com/2022/05/07/adam-creighton-eclipses-his-own-idiocy/
- https://www.covid19data.com.au/deaths
- https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
- https://news.umich.edu/lockdowns-during-early-pandemic-saved-lives-but-not-a-go-to-strategy-moving-forward/
- https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/australia-s-covid-19-response-may-have-saved-more
Adam (The Cretan ) Creighton is a Murdoch lap dog
Terence,
He amazes me. He is either incapable as a ‘journalist’ or he has no scruples. As he works for Murdoch I’d suspect it is the latter.
Did you set him straight? A quick look at that link suggests no-one has – specifically.
Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Tegnell, who made the early calls (and was criticised by other Swedish health experts for doing so), apologised nationally for his mistake. King Gustaf said it was a major failure and the Swedish PM agreed, but what would they know compared to an uninformed neocon with his head where the sun don’t shine? There have been some analyses of the relative economic outcomes with similar Nordic economies and when I last looked Sweden didn’t didn’t fare any better. Haven’t taken any notice for about 12 months but that’s better than inventing bullshit like this fool has.
His posts suggest the bloke’s an ideologically blind simpleton.
Jon,
Yeah, I saw that Sweden had basically apologised to the populace for killing so many of them. It would be a waste of time having a go at Creighton. He has no morals. https://blotreport.com/2021/01/29/the-swedish-model/
JHU stats suggest to me that Creighton’s either wilfully ignorant or intentionally misleading his credulous followers. Even his arbitrary timeframe won’t save him. Post this link: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality with the comment that JHU’s latest figs show Sweden was actually the worst performing among Nordic countries in both raw numbers and as a % of population (211/100K), and more than 3 times Australia’s on a population basis. Even disregarding what may well be unreliable figs from many countries, Sweden is a LONG way off the best internationally.
Excess mortality rate is a VERY simplistic measure (things like national age profiles, reporting accuracy, health expertise and facilities, movement of people/isolation of the country, national wealth and health – eg underlying health problems prevalent in western societies, access to vaccines etc) obviously have significant effects on fatality rates but that would be beyond Creighton’s IQ level so no point mentioning those things.