Review: Sweden was “the enemy’s headquarters”

Britain’s former health minister Matt Hancock painted Sweden and state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell as enemies during the pandemic, according to an analysis in The Telegraph.

The reason was that Sweden stuck to its voluntary covid strategy.

The British newspaper The Telegraph has reviewed over 100,000 messages between the then health secretary Matt Hancock and his close associates during the covid pandemic.

In the Whatsapp chats, it appears that Sweden, which applied a softer strategy that mostly consisted of voluntary advice and recommendations, caught the eye.

“Anyone who had something critical to say about the shutdown or its consequences was seen as an enemy. And where was the enemy’s global headquarters? In Sweden,” writes reporter Fraser Nelson, one of the reporters who worked on the review, in a guest editorial in Svenska Dagbladet.

Fought for his choice of path

Among other things, the health minister is said to have called for points from his employees that explain why Sweden made a mistake and himself shared an incorrect article about Tegnell regretting his choice of strategy.

The UK, unlike Sweden, introduced a strict lockdown with the help of rules and laws. Still, the death toll in Britain landed high.

“At first they were humble about whether the lockdown was right or not, but over time the choice of path itself became important to fight for and win redress for,” writes Nelson in SvD.

Lowest in Europe

Statistics Sweden’s compilation shows that Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest in the EU during the pandemic.

Anders Tegnell, however, did not want to portray Sweden as a “winner” and has emphasized that more measures than excess mortality are needed to evaluate how successful the virus handling really was.