Denmark is first in Europe to raise retirement age to 70

Link: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/denmark-retirement-age-70-2tgr5rvv7

Excerpt:

Workers born after 1970 have been told they need to keep going for another three years — and many are not happy

Denmark has raised its retirement age to 70 for everyone born after 1970, becoming the first European country to reach the symbolic threshold.

While other nations are bogged down in seemingly intractable political battles over increasing the state pension age, the Danes are following a long-established principle that it should go up broadly in line with life expectancy. The average for Danes is 81.7 years. The legislation was passed with an overwhelming majority in the Danish parliament.

However, there is a good deal of public unease at the plan to oblige many people to keep working until the end of their seventh decade. Some MPs look aghast at projections that the retirement age could rise as high as 77.

Author(s): Oliver Moody

Publication Date: 22 May 2025

Publication Site: The Times

COVID-19 cases rise every day in Denmark, but the country is confident it can live without restrictions for now

Link:https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-13/denmark-has-taken-living-with-covid-to-a-whole-new-level/100812736

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Excerpt:

At the beginning of February, the Danish government decided COVID-19 was no longer a “socially critical disease” and it scrapped all restrictions.

Danes aren’t even legally required to quarantine.

Denmark was among the first countries in the world to implement a lockdown, in March 2020, amid the rapid spread of COVID-19.

It also invested heavily in genomic sequencing to track new variants like the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron, which is now dominant in Denmark and even more transmissible than the original strain.

And when the Omicron variant began spreading rapidly last year, Denmark reimposed restrictions on workplaces, hospitality and schools in December.

But Tyra Grove Krause, the chief epidemiologist at Denmark’s State Serum Institute, said it also sparked a major rethink in the country’s approach to COVID-19.

Author(s): Nick Dole

Publication Date: 12 Feb 2022

Publication Site: ABC News Australia

Huge vaccine error: 9,000 patients were forgotten

Link: https://stiften.dk/artikel/k%C3%A6mpe-vaccinefejl-9-000-patienter-blev-glemt

Excerpt (via Google Translate):

Jørgen Schøler Kristensen, Medical Director at Aarhus University Hospital, explains the error as follows:

– When patients with a civil registration number beginning with 0 had to be entered, the civil registration number was declared invalid if a hyphen was missing. So 26 percent of the civil registration numbers we have reported have not been entered correctly, so they have not received the invitation in their e-box to be vaccinated as they should have had, says Jørgen Schøler Kristensen.

Patients born the first nine days of any month and having been unlucky with a hyphen were forgotten.

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Author(s): Jens Christian Thaysen

Publication Date: 19 March 2021

Publication Site: Århus Stiftstidende

Pausing AstraZeneca COVID-19 Shots Is a Bad Risk/Benefit Call

Excerpt:

Last week Austria, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland all suspended the administration of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, citing reports of blood clots occurring in a few folks who had been inoculated with it. Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Thailand, and the Netherlands have now joined them.

“There is no causal effect established or anything like that yet,” Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin told CNBC, “but as a precautionary move in line with the precautionary principle and in an abundance of caution, our clinical advice was to pause the program whilst the EMA does a review of this.”

The precautionary principle is an ideological construct that eschews risk-benefit evaluations and essentially requires that all new technologies be somehow proved entirely risk-free before they can be used.

Author(s): Ronald Bailey

Publication Date: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: Reason