Sweden's strategy would have worked fine everywhere. Most deaths are in care homes, that general lockdowns don't protect, and anyway, remember that they were never advertised as reducing deaths? The virus just comes back when lockdowns are over, even if you assume they work.
Sweden is the winner of COVID, by far. It is indeed vindicated.
What's your metric? Because in terms of deaths per capita, they are supposedly worse off than France - as well as the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Norway, and Greece. So far, Sweden is not doing as good or better than most of western Europe...
It’s cherry-picking to take two countries that did better, simply because you prefer that narrative.
Ranking items and then choosing the most favorable is exactly where the phrase came from. "Clear and consistent" is not sufficient. Any lie can be clear and consistent. There also has to be a reason beyond self-interest for limiting the sample to a particular subset.
Observing where an item lies in a ranked list is no more or less biased than picking a median.
Belgium
Spain
United Kingdom
Italy
Sweden
France
Netherlands
Ireland
Switzerland
Portugal
Germany
Denmark
Austria
Finland
Norway
Greece
Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy are indeed worse off than Sweden, and it isn’t selective to point it out. That’s all I’m saying here.
Belgium
Spain
United Kingdom
Italy
Sweden
France
Netherlands
Portugal
Germany
Greece
Anyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense.
If you want to go that way, it's better to look at integrated metrics instead of discarding data points (I only did so because I was lazy and didn't want to look up the data for all the countries with less than a city's woth of inhabitants).
So let's do that:
Sweden's death rate per 1k population is 0.58, whereas the average rate (averaged over population) for western Europe[1] is 0.42. Sweden just isn't doing as good or better than most of western Europe.
For reference, spread among countries is 0.025 (Monaco) to 1.24 (San Marino) with a median of 0.20 for the full list, and 0.028 (Greece) to 0.86 (Belgium) with a median of 0.30 for my restricted one. The median of your list is 0.52.
[1] Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.