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 studies use 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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Sweden Stumbles along the Third Way
Peter Baldwin
1. In the rupture between this and another world to come: introductory remarks on pandemic emergency and Sweden’s response
Sigurd Bergmann and Martin Lindström
2. A timeline of events: December 2019 to February 2022
Sigurd Bergmann
3. An expert authority without real experts? Deliberate disinformation from the Swedish Public Health Agency on the SARS-CoV-2 infection’s spread in the population
Anders Vahlne
4. The COVID-19-pandemic and the Swedish strategy: central aspects of the implementation of the strategy in relation to evidence-based medicine
Martin Lindström
5. The Swedish COVID-19 response: from poorly judged utilitarianism to history revisionism and the tragedy of the commons
Emil Bergholtz
6. Learning from failure: mastering a pandemic in the triad of science, politics and trust
Sigurd Bergmann
7. Epidemiology and COVID-19¬: why numbers are important and can be misleading
Nele Brusselaers
8. The political economy of estimating immunity levels
Rodney Edvinsson
9. Children at the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic
Johanna Höög
10. The Biopolitics of Herd Immunity
Lapo Lappin
11. Collaborators, supporters, and science judges: how trust in the Public Health Agency’s messaging was achieved
Kajsa Klein
12. Sweden unmasked: reading state and society through the pandemic
Jens Stilhoff Sörensen
13. Sweden’s preventive medicine: a drastic end to a 280-year long story of success
Gunnar Steineck
