The true story of Swedish COVID-19: the private and public specialist versions were radically different



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A month after the coronavirus was declared a “socially dangerous” disease in February, the Swedish Public Health Agency essentially lowered its arms and decided to pursue herd immunity rather than take serious steps to slow the spread of the virus, according to internal documents. confidential. .

This fateful and fatal early decision distorted the entire Swedish response to the pandemic, from the refusal to introduce the mandatory wearing of masks to the random testing regime.

Sweden’s failed response to the coronavirus is no longer news: even the country’s King Carl XVI Gustaf acknowledged in his annual Christmas speech that the Swedish government had “failed.” However, the private emails seen by Foreign Policy (some of which have already been published in the Swedish press) reveal that the Swedish health authorities have accepted mass infections from the start, whatever the cost.

Throughout the pandemic, Swedish health officials spoke one thing publicly about almost every aspect of crisis management and another entirely when they spoke privately. The government has repeatedly publicly denied that it deliberately sought to form a herd immunity, even though that strategy was being applied behind closed doors. Contradictory statements were also made about the possibility of testing.

In the public sphere, there was even a persistent negative (despite recognition in the private setting) of the spread of the virus, and this was just one example of an attempt to officially mislead the public during the pandemic.



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