One month after declaring the coronavirus a “socially dangerous” disease in February, the Swedish Public Health Agency essentially threw up its hands and chose to seek herd immunity rather than take serious steps to mitigate the virus’s spread, confidential internal documents show. That fateful—and fatalistic—early decision shaped Sweden’s entire response to the pandemic, from a refusal to mandate masks to a haphazard testing regime.
Sweden’s botched coronavirus response is no longer news: Even the country’s king, Carl XVI Gustaf, admitted in his annual Christmas address that the Swedish government had “failed.” But private emails seen by Foreign Policy, some of which have been previously reported in the Swedish press, reveal that Sweden’s health authorities were resigned to mass infections—so called herd immunity—all along, and no matter the costs. Throughout the pandemic, Sweden’s health authorities have said one thing publicly and something different in private about nearly every aspect of their management of the crisis. There were repeated public denials from the government that it deliberately sought to achieve herd immunity, even though that was the strategy pursued behind closed doors. There were misleading statements on the availability of testing. There was even continued public denial (despite private acknowledgement) of how the virus spreads, part of a pattern of apparent official obfuscation that’s lasted the whole pandemic.
