[ad_1]
In a previous interview with DN, Anders Tegnell believes that Sweden’s high mortality rates in corona during the spring can be explained, among other things, by last year’s mild flu season. As fewer died of influenza in the previous year, there were more fragile people who later died in covid-19. When Svenska Dagbladet reviews Eurostat statistics on deaths in Europe, it shows that our neighboring countries have also had a mild flu season without having had high mortality rates during the corona pandemic.
Anders Tegnell refers in the interview with Svenska Dagbladet to a YouTube clip of the Irish polemicist Ivor Cummins. The clip is about a study of 16 possible explanations for Sweden’s high crown mortality. The study’s findings are in turn based on Cummins’ own charts and tweets on Swedish flu mortality.
Cummins, who has made herself known through social media, is a controversial person whose credibility has been questioned. Anders Tegnell says he knows who Cummins is.
So why are you referring to Ivor Cummins?
– It’s not about him as a person. Or if he is right or not. But my point was that when we talk about mortality, we must understand that there is a lot that affects mortality in a country that is not directly linked to the pandemic or even less to the measures we take, says Anders Tegnell and adds:
– Actually, I am not only referring to him, but to an article that he had pointed out.
How did you get in touch with the YouTube clip?
– He ran past. I’ve probably received this clip from ten different sources and that’s how I found the study, says Anders Tegnell.
Ivor Cummins has made a name for himself as a polemicist with controversial views on many topics, including diet and health.
– He is not a researcher, but a kind of engineer, and he has made a name for himself by jumping on all forms of alternative explanatory models and conspiracies, and being against the system. Sometimes he’s right, but he swings wildly, has a position, and then looks for facts that fit his position. And he has a clear agenda and makes money selling books, YouTube videos, and lecturing, says Daniel Berglind, a researcher in the Department of Global Public Health at the Karolinska Institutet.
Daniel Berglind means that Ivor Cummins is not a font that he would use himself.
– I would really take the opportunity to refer to something that Ivor Cummins has had to do with. Google it a bit. Pretty quickly one realizes that he is not a credible source, he says.
Anders Tegnell, who has previously dismissed reports in which the authors did not have a sufficient scientific basis, believes that the study in the YouTube clip appears to have been published by a scientific medical journal.
When DN looks at whether the study has been peer-reviewed on the same topic, also called peer review, it says at the bottom of the first page of the study that it has not.
The study has not been reviewed. Didn’t you know that?
– It definitely looked posted when I read it. Usually, in the case of scientific journals, it means peer-reviewed. Then there will always be opinions about what is published. A lot is being published right now with great hesitation.
– I’m not saying that he (Cummins) is right or wrong, I’m just pointing out the importance of thinking for a while before making very categorical assessments of mortality.
