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Allison Pearson meets the man who stopped lockdown in Sweden

While the world’s governments pushed crippling Covid restrictions on their people, the Scandinavian nation’s state epidemiologist stood apart.

Allison Pearson meets him

‘In all discussions we had, the mental health of children featured very highly’

If you can keep your head when all about you, Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

Rudyard Kipling

In March 2020, as, one by one, every country in the Western world succumbed to panic and imposed a lockdown on its population, Sweden’s state epidemiologist held his nerve and stuck to the plan. The Swedish people would be given sensible advice and told to work from home wherever possible, but apart from a ban on gatherings over 50 and a few rules for restaurants, any Covid measures were entirely voluntary.

Anders Tegnell simply didn’t think the evidence supported a lockdown. A veteran of the swine flu pandemic who had worked with Ebola, the 63-year-old doctor wasn’t going to do something unproven because a lot of over-heated people were yelling at him to do it.

This was Sweden’s first piece of good luck. Years earlier, Tegnell had been talent-spotted by Johan Giesecke, who had held the title of state epidemiologist himself. Giesecke singled out the young medic for his character which he praised as “apolitical – one of those people who did what they were supposed to without reflecting too much on what was expedient or politically viable at the time”.

Tegnell possessed the same cool detachment that made his fellow Swede, Bjorn Borg, a great champion. He even shared the tennis star’s mantra: “Ice in the stomach.”

Such qualities were to prove invaluable on the lonely and hugely controversial course that Tegnell charted through the pandemic.

It was to become known as the “Swedish Experiment”. Reviled internationally, Tegnell was accused of playing Russian roulette with his population. He was a eugenicist, they said, who “doesn’t care if people die”.

But, as a quietly modest but firmly unrepentant Tegnell told me when we met recently at the university in his home town of Linkoping, it wasn’t Sweden that had opted for a vast experiment called lockdown.

“If you go back to the Spanish flu (1918-19), you can find instances when they tried to lock things down,” he says. “But in all the pandemic plans we have been discussing during the last decades, closing down a society has never even been on the agenda.”

Shutting down could be of benefit for a short while, he concedes. “I mean, if you know that your healthcare system needs a few weeks to ramp up the ICU and so on, there are instances when such things can be a solution.”

Normally, though, you wouldn’t go down that route because an airborne respiratory virus was going to sweep through the population anyway. The best you could hope for was to slow it down while protecting the vulnerable.

Weighing things up with his team at the Public Health Agency in Stockholm, Tegnell reckoned that the cost of lockdown – to the economy, children, education, general health and wellbeing – would be horrifyingly high. So why does he think the other countries went for it?

Tegnell reckons it was the brutal Chinese crackdown in Wuhan that inspired Western governments. “China is, of course, a state where [draconian] things like that can be done,” he says.

“And it did work to a certain extent. So, for a while, there was an idea that we should have very strict measures. Bring the hammer down hard and then take the hammer away and then let it slowly build up again and then, Bam! But that never worked.”

Tegnell’s craggy visage cracks a rueful smile. “We learn quite soon that it’s easy to start having different kind of restrictions, but it’s very difficult to stop having them.”

It sure is when you know the virus will come roaring back. That was one problem lockdown advocates failed to foresee. To a remarkable extent, scared people (the British were deliberately and professionally frightened by government psychologists, remember) fell in love with their Corona captivity. And that, in a nutshell, is how every country in Europe ended up suffering from Stockholm Syndrome while, in Stockholm, life went on.

Tegnell points proudly to mobile phone records which indicate that Swedes chose to restrict travel and social activities which were criminalised elsewhere. If Tegnell was right, and it was fine for family members to see each other, for children to run around in playgrounds, were the British people victims of wrongful imprisonment?

It is three years since the then prime minister made a solemn TV announcement telling the British people: “You must stay at home,” but what exactly was “the science” behind only being allowed outside once a day? (Swedes were being told it was safest to be outdoors. Swedish national parks had never had so many visitors, Tegnell says.) Few dared ask. The scientists who broadly agreed with the Swedish approach, like Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Carl Heneghan, were either slandered or silenced.

“Three weeks to flatten the curve,” turned into months of restrictions.

Sweden became hugely important to those of us who thought lockdown was bound to do more harm than good. The name Tegnell acquired an almost talismanic power.

By the end of the first week of March 2020, as restrictions deepened across the world, Tegnell’s stoical, light-touch approach came under fire at home from other scientists and senior figures in the media. The political editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s newspaper of record, tweeted that children being told to go back to the classroom after the February break was incomprehensible.

The pressure mounted when neighbouring Denmark and Norway closed all schools on the 11th and 12th respectively. Still, Tegnell resisted. Over-16s and university students would move to remote learning, he agreed, but in the early morning of March 13, Johan Giesecke emailed his protege a single line of Latin: “An necsis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?” (Don’t you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?)

The two veteran epidemiologists were privately aghast. “The world has gone mad,” Tegnell told colleagues. “The fact that the politicians then went as far as they did with so little evidence about what kind of effects they would get... In Sweden, it’s even written into the law that the health care should be driven by evidence-based medicine and that was so quickly left behind in other places.”

This was Sweden’s second stroke of luck, I think. The country’s constitution forbids politicians from making public health decisions and gives all the power to the Public Health Agency. Stefan Lofven, Sweden’s prime minister, was kept in the loop along with other ministers, but they played no part in the 2pm daily press briefings. Those were led by Tegnell, who rapidly acquired the status of national hero. That craggy face was printed on T-shirts; the young even sported Tegnell tattoos.

Tegnell is not a demonstrative man, but he cannot hide his delight when I mention that I heard his wife got a large bouquet to thank her “for lending him to us”. “Yes, and there were lots delivered to my building. Public health agencies don’t so often get flowers,” he smiles. (There were darker times too... Until recently, Tegnell had two bodyguards following threats to his life on social media from conspiracy theorists of all stripes).

Basically, it was quite simple. Tegnell trusted the people and they rewarded him for treating them like grown-ups by trusting him right back. Huge public confidence in the state epidemiologist only took a dent when the second Covid wave proved to be bigger than he’d hoped. (Even then, when he finally suggested that masks should be worn on public transport, only 15 per cent of travellers bothered. If Tegnell didn’t think masks were much cop then neither did Swedes).

Tegnell is not an easy man to read – he has the unrushed impassivity of a taciturn sheriff in a Western – but he is visibly taken aback when I tell him that we had a group in the UK called SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour) which said that, in order to increase adherence to social distancing measures, the “perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased”. “I’m a great believer that most people are reasonably sane and if you give them good information about what they can do and the possible threat that they might experience, they usually make good choices,” he responds. “In Sweden, we try to inform people about what we know and what we don’t know and what kind of things that can be done and that can have some kind of reasonable effect on the risk for you as an individual or a risk for your family.”

It could all have been so different. Until March 23, 2020, the UK was following the same mitigation (“squash the sombrero”) strategy as Sweden. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” Tegnell had replied just a few days earlier when a colleague emailed him a Youtube clip of Boris Johnson and Sir Patrick Vallance explaining that they didn’t want to prevent everyone getting the virus because immunity must be allowed to build up in the population.

All that changed after a report on March 16 by Professor Neil Ferguson and Imperial College predicted that letting the virus spread freely in the UK without any measure being taken would result in 510,000 deaths.

Almost overnight, the previously uncontroversial concept of herd immunity – flokk immunitet in Swedish – and educating the public so they could assess their own risk became a callous idea and anyone who believed in it was a Granny Killer. Was Tegnell disappointed by the British U-turn? “I think everybody did the best they could in the circumstances” he says.

“Of course, it’s always nice to have somebody else who thinks and does about the same as you do because then you can share experience and become much better.”

Tegnell is far more critical of the Neil Ferguson report which, he points out was not even peer-reviewed.

“We had worked with modelling quite a lot in our agency and I think we knew very much about both the strengths and the weaknesses. It can be a very nice tool if you use it the right way. But if you model with data that is not of very high reliability, the results can be very, very tricky and you need to be very cautious. If you put numbers into models and you don’t know those numbers are fairly much correct, you can arrive at very, very strange results. You need to weigh together different sources of science and then you can maybe arrive at something that’s reasonably, hopefully true,” Tegnell continues, “But to rely very much on just one study, one model, that’s quite dangerous.”

Dangerous? Was Boris hustled into lockdown on the basis of a worse-case scenario that wasn’t double-checked against real-world evidence before the country was shut down for months?

Of course, Tegnell wasn’t perfect. A failure to act faster to protect care homes is among his biggest regrets. There were systemic problems with nursing care in Sweden even before the pandemic, he explains, but the health experts should have done more to stem the high number of deaths.

What Tegnell got right was never directing hospitals to discontinue non-covid care (as happened in the NHS) and digging his heels in to protect children who were at remarkably little risk from Covid

(”I have never known a virus with a clearer age profile”). With every other European country closing its schools, why was keeping them open so important to him?

“In all the discussions we had, mental health of children was very high because we know that, if they are not able to go to school, mental health will deteriorate. There’s lots of studies and evidence around that. And we also knew that one of the major problems with public health in Sweden [before the pandemic] was the mental health among the young. So, we didn’t want to hurt that any more than we already did.”

The Lancet estimated that the bill for closing British schools for 12 weeks was one per cent of GDP because so many parents would need to stay home. But that wasn’t the true bill. Not even close. Among the hidden costs were almost 100,000 “ghost” children who never returned to the classroom and over a million youngsters now on a waiting list for mental health services.

Karl Lauterbach, Germany’s fervent lockdown chief, recently said that closing schools was “a bad mistake” and some Covid restrictions were “idiotic”. Does Tegnell think we are seeing an admission that lockdown did indeed cause the horrifying collateral damage that he foresaw? He nods slowly. “Yes, I think we are in a period of review and reevaluation and schools are such a good example because it’s so clear that the benefits were basically none and the damage you could do was so extensive.”

“F ****** Sweden argument,” ranted Matt Hancock on Whatsapp, asking aides to “supply three or four bullets [points] of why Sweden is wrong”.

Our then heath secretary wasn’t interested in whether Tegnell might be on to something with his determination to keep the public calm and wellinformed instead of “frighten the pants off them”, which was the preferred

Hancock strategy. If Sweden started to do well it would simply be unwanted evidence that Hancock and lockdown had been wrong.

The PM and Rishi Sunak had held a secret Zoom meeting with Tegnell and professors Gupta and Heneghan in September 2020 to hear their take on a potential “circuit-breaker lockdown”. Tegnell says he was “a bit surprised” to be asked. His impression was that Boris and Rishi were “quite open” to hearing it was a bad idea. Hancock was furious when he found out the lockdown sceptics had the ear of the PM.

After a shaky start (in May 2020, the country had the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world), Sweden did start to do well. Very well. Embarrassingly well. Critics who had crowed about its early high Covid mortality fell silent. As I write, Sweden has the lowest rate of excess deaths of any European country (that’s how many more people die every month compared to normal). It may not be the very lowest once you standardise for age and pre-pandemic trends, but it’s still an astonishing achievement.

Is Tegnell happy that it looks increasingly like the verdict of history will be that Sweden defied the Western lockdown consensus and was vindicated? “I don’t really like to be called vindicated,” he says, “because this is not a competition. This is about public health. It’s about trying to do your best to keep your population as healthy as they possibly can be during a health crisis.” Besides, the data can be tricky and needs more scrutiny, he thinks.

Sweden has already concluded its Covid-19 Inquiry (the one the UK has hardly begun). In the final report, which was published in February 2022, the National Commission found that the voluntary measures adopted under the direction of Tegnell were appropriate and maintained Swedes’ personal freedom during the pandemic. However, earlier, more extensive measures should have been taken, especially during the first wave. What the Commission didn’t comment on is the invaluable role that Tegnell and his country played in countering the global madness.

“The world hid its uncertainty by scolding Sweden,” Preben Aavistland, Norway’s director of public health, observed recently. What characterises many of the Nobel winners in science is that they challenged the orthodoxies of their era and stood up for what they believed the evidence proved. Might Tegnell be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine? A fanciful thought, but this son of Sweden undeniably became a remarkable one-man rebuke to the folly of other nations.

As a doctor, he tells me you must always think of the impact of any action on all of your patients, not just a few. As we are saying goodbye, I tell him “Tegnell, you are a legend. If there’s another pandemic, I’m moving to Sweden.” What Tegnell did in the spring of 2020 will be valued and discussed long after he is gone. He didn’t need to do things to make him look like a strong man. He was a strong man.

You can hear an edited version of Allison’s interview with Anders Tegnell on the Planet Normal podcast. The full version is available to Telegraph subscribers at Telegraph.co.uk

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