Of all the celebrities that have been created during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell is perhaps the most surprising. A softly-spoken official within the Swedish Health Agency, he has quietly been going about his work monitoring infectious diseases for years.
But his decision, when Covid hit, to stick to his long-established plan and not recommend mandatory lockdowns, not close the schools, turned him into a lightning rod for competing views on the pandemic. Endless articles have been written about him in media across the world and some Swedes are known to have had tattoos made of him.
UnHerd spoke to him back in July 2020, when he defended the lack of mask mandates and was hopeful that widespread immunity would protect the Swedes from a bad winter wave — a hope that turned out to be overly optimistic. “Judge me in a year,” he said.
Just over a year later, on the eve of Sweden releasing almost all of its remaining Covid restrictions on September 29th, Freddie Sayers spoke to him again. His message? On the big questions — whether Covid was something we had to live with, whether schools should be shut — he believes he has been vindicated.
As ever, many thanks to Anders for taking the time.
On vaccinations:
On winning the main argument:
Denmark has declared that Covid is no longer a ‘critical threat’. Will Sweden be doing the same?
On the coming winter:
But didn’t the same optimism turn out to be misplaced last time?
Why did Sweden act differently to other countries?
The other aspect is that the legal system we have in place, forces us to focus on areas where we really can see that there is a high level of threat, so to speak, where there is a high risk of transmission. And that’s why we moved into regulating restaurants very strongly, and left other portions of society more open. Because we could see spread in the restaurants, but we couldn’t see a lot of disease spreading by young people playing football or things like that. We definitely didn’t see a lot of spread in the schools.
On being proud of keeping schools open:
A less divided country:
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