While it’s true Sweden did recommend against vaccinating young children, the public health realities in America and Sweden are markedly different.

Nearly 75 percent of Swedes are fully vaccinated, lapping America by a full 10 percentage points. And while Sweden largely eschewed lockdowns, a far higher percentage of Swedes voluntarily masked up and socially-distanced during the height of the pandemic, preventing the kind of direct hit that has devastated the U.S. for the past two years…

Universal health care isn’t a cure-all, either. Sweden’s decision to keep schools open during the pandemic was driven more by a critical need to keep doctors and nurses in hospitals as rates rose. Closing schools would have moved nurses out of hospitals and into home child care at a time when Sweden needed fully-staffed ICUs. And like in the U.S., the end result was predictable: those lax school policies doubled Swedish teachers’ COVID exposure risk.