Sweden had a 10x death rate for the first year of the pandemic vs its direct neighbors. That's the data published by Sweden, Norway, and Finland. You can ignore it if you want or just claim it's "highly politically motivated and extremely biased" because it's against what you want to believe. All Nordic countries did relatively well on death rate, that's why GBD have seized upon Sweden as a success story, but it was obviously worse than Norway and Finland.

When I talk with GBD proponents it always boils down to this: they won't believe the data and make up a variety of reasons why not to trust it, then they turn around and trust far worse analyses like the article comparing Sweden and non-Nordic countries with much worse obesity and far different systems (like the article comparing Sweden vs other EU).