Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment

Description

This book considers Sweden’s pandemic management which differed so significantly from much of the rest of the world: it provoked intense and wide-reaching interest, curiosity and criticism. Trans-disciplinary Swedish authors from the humanities, life sciences, social sciences, and cultural studiesuse a variety of tools to mine deeper into some of the central elements and dimensions in their country’s pandemic management such as understandings of freedom, the execution of power, denialism, exceptionalism, patriotism, the role of expertise and trust in the national state to give a deeper understanding of Sweden’s decisions, failures, successes, and the lessons to be learned. Aimed at readers with interest in global health and politics it will also be of interest in disciplines such as virology,epidemiology, history, cultural studies, ethics, media studies, medicine and economics. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Cover Endorsement Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements Sweden stumbles along the Third Way 1 In the rupture between this and another world to come: introductory remarks on pandemic emergency and Sweden’s response 2 A timeline of events: December 2019 to February 2022 3 On the virology of SARS-CoV-2 and an expert authority without real experts: was there a deliberate disinformation from the Public Health Agency of Sweden on the SARS-CoV-2 infection’s spread in the population? 4 The Covid-19 pandemic and the Swedish strategy: central aspects of the strategy in relation to evidence and evidence-based medicine criteria 5 The Swedish Covid-19 response: from poorly judged utilitarianism to history revisionism and the tragedy of the commons 6 Learning from failure: mastering a pandemic in the triad of science, politics and trust 7 Epidemiology and Covid-19: why numbers are important and can be misleading 8 The political economy of estimating immunity levels 9 Children at the front line of the Covid-19 pandemic 10 The biopolitics of herd immunity 11 Collaborators, supporters, and science judges: how trust in the Public Health Agency’s messaging was achieved 12 Sweden unmasked: reading state and society through the pandemic 13 A drastic end to a long story of success in Swedish preventive medicine Index