Chapter Seven - *That* Tech Bro Article and

*That* Report from Imperial

One of the people I kept arguing with during the first stage of the pandemic was Björn Smedman, a civil engineer convinced of his own excellence, vocal in his criticism of the Public Health Agency and whose opinion was "When in (too much) doubt, lockdown". 

Of course I thought his arguments didn't hold water and I let him know in no uncertain terms. 

On April 20 Björn posted a screenshot of a chart called "Approximation of Countries along the Hammer and the Dance Phases" with the comment that the rest of the world will struggle to understand the Swedish strategy. 

I asked Björn for the source and he said "It was just some dumb blog". I thought that sounded like an apt description and quickly forgot about it. 

That blog entry, the phrase "The Hammer and the Dance" and its author, Tomas Pueyo, would soon be back with a vengeance and again, just like with the "civil servants without talent..." text, I was flabbergasted by the lack of scientific stringency.

On March 13 Pueyo had debated the pandemic with John Edmunds, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and advisor to Boris Johnson's government. Why Pueyo was invited in the first place is hard to understand; he's an engineer with an MBA (in short another tech bro with an unshakeable belief in his own excellence), who'd published a book called The Star Wars Rings: The Hidden Structure Behind the Star Wars Story, and who at the time worked as "VP Product and Growth" for Course Hero, "an online learning platform for course-specific study resources". It's not too far-fetched to believe that there was a conflict of interest here. I don't remember when I first saw the clip - it probably wasn't until July or even later. Pueyo advocated for the "Chinese solution" and his theatrics when Edmunds explained the proper science behind the pandemic (i.e. that it won't end until herd immunity has been achieved - there'll be a separate chapter about this much maligned and misunderstood concept later) made me just as angry then as it does when I see it today.

Why would anyone in their right mind listen to this Star Wars clown rather than accepting the realities of the pandemic as explained by a professor with expertise in this specific field? In a sense, this was even worse than "the 22" in Sweden; misguided as they were, at least some of them had some qualifications in the field. The answer to the question is of course that the Star Wars clown told people what they wanted to hear. Rather than accepting that the pandemic couldn't be stopped, it was more comforting to hear that it could be "crushed" with a metaphorical hammer and then countries would do the "dance" to avoid new outbreaks. (It should be added in this context that Edmunds's own views seem to have vacillated considerably. Later in 2020 he would state that lockdowns were introduced too late (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52955034), but in 2024 he was interviewed by The Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/04/covid-scientist-sir-john-edmunds-economic-cost-lockdown/) and quoted as saying "We didn’t take enough account of the economic cost of lockdown".)

The next time Pueyo appears in my feed after the discussion with Smedman seems to be in July. I now refer to Pueyo as "the idiot everybody's quoting". 

He even wrote a post specifically about Sweden (Coronavirus: Should We Aim for Herd Immunity Like Sweden?), probably because it didn't fit his "the hammer and the dance" narrative. I called it "A steaming pile of horse manure, with graphs" (the phrase "a steaming pile of horse manure" is shamelessly stolen from Black Adder, btw). The post contains a graph with the hilarious title "Countries that Beat the Coronavirus" which shows the development of the pandemic in 45 countries, 40 of which had used "the Hammer". It was obviously complete rubbish and I sent him a few tweets with the development of the pandemic in some of the countries that had supposedly "beat" the virus. Argentina, where a national lockdown was followed by a steady increase in cases, was conveniently not included in the graph (cherry-picking!), but illustrated the case well, I thought.

There were also countries which had used "the hammer" only to see that the number of cases had started rising dramatically again, like Israel. I pointed this out to him, called his article "bullshit" and him "a clueless moron", after which he blocked me, which seemed fair enough.

My contempt for his pseudo-science was boundless, probably mostly because people actually bought the snake oil he was selling. By the time winter returned to the northern hemisphere it was clear that Tegnell had been right. As quoted by Pueyo:  

These days Pueyo has moved on to other topics in which he's also eminently qualified to explain what the story is to us lesser mortals. There clearly are some people who could do with a good dose of impostor syndrome (Lex Trump). In fairness to Pueyo, at least he understood that the pandemic was over when people had been vaccinated.

Two more points need to be made about Pueyo's texts at this stage. Firstly, there are some interesting names in the acknowledgements to the post "Coronavirus: Should We Aim for Herd Immunity Like Sweden?", published on June 9 and updated on November 22 (even the title is enough to make you despair) - we'll get back to them later (Bergholtz has already featured in chapter 3).

The second point I've already touched upon: the outlandish influence his muck had, even among people who should have known much better. On April 29, a letter to the editor of DN with the caption "Alternative Corona Strategy for Sweden Could Save Lives" in which the sentence "'The Hammer and The Dance' is a more ambitious strategy" appears. Gaaah! One of the authors is Joacim Rocklöv. Rather than keeping a low profile after it was clear that his and Naucler's musings and advanced models that predicted the complete breakdown of the Swedish health care system were off by at least a factor of 10, he had now moved on to promoting Pueyo's garbage. Hannes Petri summarised the situation perfectly in a tweet I saw for the first time today: 

Yes, you'd imagine that the warning lights would be flashing, but they weren't. It also seems my own grasp of the situation was quite tenuous, to say the least; I'm very surprised to see that my comment about the improving quality and constructiveness of the debate on Twitter (see the end of chapter 6) was actually in reply to a tweet by Karim Jebari in which he refers to that very letter to the editor. At this stage, i.e. the beginning of May. It seems I wasn't really aware of the importance that "The Hammer and the Dance" had already - and inexplicably - gained, and I also mustn't have realised that Rocklöv was involved...

It was good to see that the non-science/nonsense of Pueyo was not left uncontradicted on Twitter. Here's one reply to his post about Sweden "going for herd immunity".

On the 16th of March the "Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team" lead by professor Neil Ferguson published "Report 9: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand", which would become just as influential as Pueyo's drivel. I believe it was this report that made Boris Johnson's government perform a complete u-turn, going from a "Swedish-type" strategy to a strict lockdown. I would later argue that Britain managed to combine the worst of the two strategies. Whether there's any truth to that, I don't know.

The report turned out to be just as flawed as "The Hammer and the Dance", but as far as the scientific approach was concerned it seemed solid, at least initially. I remember Tegnell being asked about the report by some journalist, quite soon after it had been published, I believe, and his response was that the report contained some extreme assumptions and that it wouldn't really influence the Swedish strategy. At this stage I had of course never heard of Ferguson and from the coverage in the news all I knew was that it advocated much stricter measures than those in place in Sweden. It would be another two years or so until I actually read the report. 

Back in May 2020, my discussions about Ferguson was limited to arguments with Björn Smedman, who was a big fan. I wondered why he was so critical of the Public Health Agency and so forgiving of Ferguson. He didn't quite see it that way, whereas, from what little I had read, it seemed to me as if Ferguson's track record seemed to be less than impressive, and that he had often erred on the negative side, i.e. overestimating the dangers of various viruses.

I believe Ferguson later went on record saying he had no problem with this. Maybe his reasoning was that it's better to err on the side of caution ("the precautionary principle"), although that means paying scant attention to the effects that this "caution" would entail (much more about this later, of course). At the time I was discussing Ferguson with Smedman, the former had become embroiled in a "scandal" with him breaking "his own rules" (i.e. staying locked down) to go see his girlfriend and he had to resign as a government advisor. My gripe with Ferguson wasn't about his private life, although hypocrisy always gets my goat - it was rather how keen he was to point out that the Swedish strategy would fail. At some stage, I believe it was in an interview with Unheard (which produced some of the best journalism about the pandemic, in particular during that first year) that he said Stockholm was headed for "a New York type situation". As far as I was concerned, this was plainly not true.

In all honesty, I'm not sure my assertion regarding the present participle holds water - and I still remember thinking that as I tweeted it; I was more interested in winning the argument, i.e. proving that Ferguson was wrong. I'd like to think that my tweets throughout the pandemic were honest and based on the facts, as far as I I understood them (N.B! I'm not saying anything about my tone - rude and honest are not mutually exclusive, one might even argue that they are two sides of the same coin...), but there'll probably be a few more tweets where I cut some corners. I'll try to call myself out when I come across any porky pies. In this particular instance, though, I think leniency is called for: Stockholm never came near a "New York type situation".

A few days later Karim Jebari wrote a thread about the Imperial report, which hadn't been peer reviewed, another term that I had just come across for the first time.

Jebari likened the code used in Ferguson et al.'s model to an "Alfons Åberg helicopter" - a reference to a very popular Swedish children's book character, who in one book builds something which turns out to be a very unorthodox helicopter made of planks - and stated that the code was "simply rubbish". 

@lejooon, a sensible and knowledgeable tweeter who was quite active in the debate that first spring ((he then had the sense to move on, leaving the rest of us to descend into further madness...), made a very good point: the problem wasn't the quality of the code per se, rather it was that the model had been allowed to directly influence measures that affected hundreds of million of people. 

On May 10 Agnes Wold wrote a thread in a reply to a tweet by Maria Gunther, who since has unfortuntaely locked her Twitter account, and who together with Amina Mansour provided nuanced reporting on the pandemic in the science pages of Dagens Nyheter. In this thread Wold pointed out how useless the advanced models were and how accurate the Public Health Agency's estimates regarding the needs for ICU beds turn out to be. 

In this thread another important figure also made his first appearance in my feed: the very knowledgable Karl Pettersson. Of course, at this stage I had no idea how much he would contribute to my understanding of the pandemic.

Smedman replied to Karl's tweet, keeping up his defence of the Alfons Åberg helicopter:

He argued that the recommendation that everyone in the family should stay at home for 14 days if one person in the household was ill proved the usefulness of the model (which I'd also argue is spurious), ignoring the fatal flaws in it. As stated in the letter to the editor linked by Karl, when applied to Swedish circumstances, the model predicted that 10,000 (!) ICU beds would be needed by April 21. As we know, the ICU occupancy peaked at around 520-530, i.e. off by a factor of nearly 20!  It also predicted that 100,000 Swedes would die before the summer with the Swedish strategy...Enough said?

A "friend" I discussed with in the middle of April also added his two cents. At the beginning of April he had predicted that there would be at least 10,000 deaths in Stockholm alone by the end of the month. 

(The first obvious issue here is the use of absolute figures. Denmark's population is about half that of Sweden, meaning that the "psychosis" and "self-destruction" alluded to could just as well be applied to Denmark at that stage. And why bother including Iceland with a total population of 300,000 in that graph in the first place? Unsurprisingly, there'd be a deluge of spurious use of statistics from all sides, but that's a topic for a later chapter.)

On April 20, I questioned his prediction, wondering if maybe he'd just been plain wrong. 

Now on May 10 he was back saying that the numbers were incorrect and that the need for ICU beds in Stockholm was and had been "infintely" higher and that people had been left to die, i.e. the same "argument" Brusselaers was spouting. 

As already discussed in chapter five, triage criteria may have been applied too strictly at one of six emergency hospitals in Stockholm, but nowhere near to the extent claimed by Brusselaers, "Torstensson" et al. 

To round off this chapter, here's an excellent and fairly short thread shining a light on Pueyo's conflicts of interest. 

So there we have it, folks: a tech bro without any credentials whatsoever in the field and a model as reliable as an Alfons Åberg helicopter made most of the world lose its head. Luckily the "civil servants without talent" at the Swedish Public Health Agency refused to be swept along in this maelstrom of pseudoscience. 

Copyright © All Rights Reserved