Anders Tegnell’ commentsAnders Tegnell was the chief epidemiologist for the Swedish Public Health Agency during the COVID pandemic, until the end of 2022.
Sweden did not lockdown, close schools, use fear, call healthcare professionals "heroes," close borders, implemented thermal screening at airports, use police and military forces to enforce regulations, applaud at eight o'clock, mandate mask-wearing, impose curfews, implement a "COVID passport," modify funeral rites, or lie about vaccines.
Here are several comments from Anders Tegnell during those days, months, and years[1],[2],[3],[4],[5] when he maintained his independence, despite some criticism in Sweden itself:
"Lockdowns are like using a hammer to kill a fly."
"Once you go into lockdown, it's hard to get out. How do you reopen? When?"
"If we go back to the Spanish flu (1918-19), we can find cases where attempts were made to shut down everything. But in all the pandemic plans we've been debating over the past few decades, shutting down a society has never even been on the agenda."
"It wasn't Sweden that opted for a vast experiment called lockdown. The world has gone mad."
"The epidemic is a marathon, not a sprint."
"In the rest of the world, emotions have been privileged over scientific evidence; they've sacrificed science for the emotional and the political. A little more ice in the stomachs of decision-makers would be helpful.”
“Sustainability, to a certain extent, is having ice in your stomach, because you need to believe in the long-term effects of what you're doing and not start doubting it too soon.”
“Closures, lockdowns, closing borders—nothing has a scientific basis.”
“Closing borders, in my opinion, is ridiculous, because COVID-19 is in every European country now…closing schools makes no sense right now. Furthermore, it's essential for psychiatric and physical health that the younger generation stay active.”
“In Sweden, for example, we've always kept schools open, and we're very happy about that because we haven't seen any negative consequences for the spread of the disease, and it has very positive consequences for children.”
“If you succeed in school there, your life will be good. If you fail, your life will be much worse. You'll live less. You'll be poorer. That, of course, is on our minds when we talk about closing schools. A lost year is a disaster.” Opening schools is about maintaining the well-being of the population and the health of the youngest children.”
“It's important to adopt a sustainable course of action that can be maintained over a long period: if you're sick, stay home. It's more feasible than asking everyone to stay home all the time, which wouldn't work in the long term.”
“The logic is that we want to achieve what everyone wants to achieve: trying to minimize the spread of the disease as much as possible and keep our healthcare system functioning and addressing both COVID cases and other needs.”
“Adopting masks is more of a statement than a measure. It's an easy fix, and I'm deeply suspicious of easy solutions to complex problems.”
“In Sweden, agencies, like public health, are strictly independent, to the point that ministries are prohibited by constitutional law from interacting with them to tell them what to do. That makes a difference.”
“The decision to close nursing homes to visitors, for example, wasn't easy to make, and we reversed it fairly quickly. It was a mistake that caused many unjustified problems… The residents suffered greatly.”
“It's always possible to take the easy way out by trying to impose things instead of the more difficult path of communication and understanding. In the end, we see that it's not that simple.”
“We tried to talk to the population as adults, to put ourselves on the same level and try to get them to understand what we were trying to achieve and what their role could be.”
“I firmly believe that the majority of the population is reasonably sane, and if you give them good information about what to do and the possible complications they may experience, they usually make good decisions.”
“Maintain social distance, wash your hands constantly, if you are sick, do not leave your home, and do not touch your face. But keep living, because this virus is here to stay.”
“Keep your distance and avoid crowds and large gatherings of people. And avoid meeting older relatives in close proximity. Those are the three basic pieces of advice we give in Sweden. And, of course, hand hygiene. Washing your hands is also important.”
“Countries that use masks aren't doing any better right now. It's very dangerous to believe that masks are a miracle cure.”
“A vaccine—if and when it arrives—will not be the "Silver bullet. Once again, I'm not a big fan of easy solutions to complex problems and believing that, once the vaccine is here, we'll be able to go back to living as we always have. I think that's a dangerous message, because it's not going to be that easy."
"We're very pleased that we can now have a more constructive debate about how to approach public health, not only from the perspective of reducing the transmission of a new disease, but from a global perspective. The opening isn't the same as during the pandemic. And yet, even during this period, voices were raised in other countries trying to follow this path. But at the time, the political personnel in these countries were probably not as aware of this approach as they are today."
"The disruption has been due, in no small part, to the very strict measures taken in many countries. And it remains to be seen whether those were the right measures and whether the sacrifice was really worth it."
"I don't like to claim anything, not even the success of our decisions, because this isn't a competition. It's about public health. It's about trying to do the best we can to keep the population as healthy as possible during a health crisis".
"Pandemic measures also have negative effects."
"We still believe our strategy was good, but there are always improvements we can make."
Anders Tegnell had the majority support of the population, politicians, and scientists, but there were also those who harshly criticized him (inside and outside Sweden), even with death threats, for which he had to hire bodyguards for a while. An example of this rejection is the closure of borders to Sweden from Denmark, Finland, and Norway. Particularly harsh were media experts, such as the New York Times in the United States[6], and "fact-checkers" and "commentators" in every country.
The covi19 lessons from Sweden
“Our results suggest that the Swedish policy of advice and trust in the population to reduce social interactions voluntarily was relatively successful. Sweden combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs. In future pandemics, policymakers should rely on empirical evidence rather than panicking and adopting extreme measures. Even if policymakers appeared to act rapidly and decisively, the rushed implementation of strict lockdowns in 2020/21 probably did more harm than good.
Perhaps the main lesson from the pandemic is the importance of not panicking during a crisis. Although policymakers face difficult challenges during an emergency, policies should have their basis in scientific evidence and a focus on the long run. Short-term decisions should not be allowed to jeopardise balanced long-run development. Before the pandemic, lockdown measures were regarded as extreme and only to be imposed temporarily – not for a period as long as two years.
Autocratic countries such as China should not serve as a role model in limiting citizens' rights.
Our evaluation, nearly four years after the outbreak of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, suggests that policymakers made two major mistakes. First, they introduced lockdowns that were too stringent and had negligible positive health effects despite the evidence available at the time pointing towards the limited benefits of such broad measures. Second, they responded to the downturn in economic activity with fiscal and monetary policies that were excessively expansionary[7]”.
The Swedish “Corona Commission believes that care for the elderly was unprepared and ill-equipped when the pandemic struck. This was due to structural defects which were known before the virus outbreak. The current government and previous governments bear the ultimate responsibility for these shortcomings. The government should have taken the necessary initiatives to ensure that elderly care is better equipped for a crisis of this kind. The strategy did not protect the elderly The strategy to protect the elderly has, according to the Commission, failed. According to the Commission, the structural shortcomings in the preparedness of elderly care are due in part to: 1/ a fragmented organization, 2/ a need for higher staffing, increased skills, and reasonable working conditions, 3/ an insufficient regulatory framework, 4/ barriers to municipalities hiring doctors and accessing medical equipment; and 5/ late and sometimes insufficient decisions and measures[8]”.
“The focus of Sweden’s strategy was to reduce the spread of the virus, but also to consider other aspects of public health and protect freedom and fundamental rights. While the Swedish strategy remains controversial, today most countries are taking similar approaches to the continuing pandemic. Looking back, it seems a bit unjust that the country that followed its pre-pandemic plan was the country accused of conducting an experiment on its population. Perhaps Sweden instead should be considered the control group, while the rest of the world underwent an experiment[9]”.
Conclusion[10]
John Ioannidis: “General school closures, curfews, lockdowns, assembly bans and even vaccination mandates against the recommendations of national pandemic plans. Hardly any of the measures do we have evidence to say that they make a difference for decreasing the number of cases”.
“Five years ago, so-called containment measures began worldwide due to a coronavirus that was declared new and initially classified as very deadly.
General school closures, curfews, lockdowns, assembly bans and even vaccination mandates were decided against the recommendations of existing national pandemic plans. These so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions(NPIs) were intended to slow the spread of the virus and at the same time represented a significant encroachment on the civil liberties of citizens.
I take stock of the proportionality and effectiveness of these measures in a conversation with one of the world’s most cited scientists. John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and top epidemiologist at Stanford University, was a guest in Berlin and took the time to talk to me about pandemic policy. (15th of March 2025).
We not only shed light on the questions of how dangerous SARS-Cov2 really was or how it could happen that the social debate space was so poisoned. We also talk about the effectiveness of mod-RNA injections and the significance of leaked RKI-minutes, which revealed the strong influence of politics on science.
Asked about the origin of the virus in the preliminary discussion, Ioannidis replied:
“Regarding the origin of the virus, I have always believed that we need transparency in research, so in the critical case we need full transparency on what experiments were done and in what conditions and precautions. In the absence of such transparency, the debate moves out of science and becomes an issue for the secret services, which is a pity for science. I realize that the balance is gradually shifting and that some secrete services claim that it was a lab leak. I cannot judge secret services, this is not my expertise, but I do worry that a narrative “secrete services say it was a lab leak“ can be linked easily with a narrative „so, it must have been a horrible virus and therefore all the horrible measures we took were justified“. This makes me very uneasy”.
[1]‘Closing borders is ridiculous’: the epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial coronavirus strategy. https://covidcalltohumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Palertini_Closing-Borders-Is-Ridiculous.pdf
[2]Anders Tegnell and the Swedish Covid experiment. https://www.ft.com/content/5cc92d45-fbdb-43b7-9c66-26501693a371
[3]Sweden’s Dr. No-Lockdown denies ‘tactical retreat’. https://www.politico.eu/article/swedens-dr-no-lockdown-denies-tactical-retreat/
[4]‘You have to understand how a society works’: Swedish epidemiologist defends light-touch pandemic response https://www.irishtimes.com/world/2023/03/09/swedish-epidemiologist-defends-light-touch-pandemic-response/
[5]Allison Pearson meets Anders Tegnell: ‘Lockdown was never on the agenda in Sweden’ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/23/anders-tegnell-swedens-pandemic-plan-lockdown-never-agenda/
[6]Sweden Tries Out a New Status: Pariah State. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus-pariah-scandinavia.html
[7]The Covid-19 lesson from Sweden https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecaf.12611
[8]Summary of SOU 2020:80 Elderly care during the pandemic https://www.government.se/legal-documents/2020/12/summary-of-sou-202080-elderly-care-during-the-pandemic/
[9]Did Sweden’s controversial COVID strategy pay off? In many ways it did – but it let the elderly down. https://theconversation.com/did-swedens-controversial-covid-strategy-pay-off-in-many-ways-it-did-but-it-let-the-elderly-down-188338
[10]The legacy of COVID-19 policies with John Ioannidis https://blog.bastian-barucker.de/covid-19-policies-john-ioannidis/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-c9C-k7C5c
