"Yet, there's no outrage": the fabrication of herd immunity in Sweden–an interview

Daniel J. (a pseudonym) is a male accountant who was 33 years old and he lives in Stockholm, Sweden. He is fluent in both Swedish and English. He is a member of the Communist Party (Sweden). He was interviewed by William Silversmith in June 2023. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Will: Hi Daniel, thanks for talking to me today. I want to start off with some basic questions about your experiences. To start off, why do you feel strongly enough about the pandemic to organize?

Daniel: I started the pandemic by isolating and not paying a lot of attention to what happened elsewhere. There were some protective measures, but they're really bad so I figured I'll just stay at home.

In December 2021, a friend in Romania linked me to the spread in South Africa (Omicron). That seemed really bad, but in Sweden, they pretended it was all over. That really bugged me. I just was really disappointed by how they didn't do anything and how complacent everyone was and how the authorities just decided it was over.

The limited political activity I've been involved with in the past six months has been great for my mental health. It helps you feel less helpless and that you're actually doing something and probably achieving something even if it's not a lot.

Will: How does Sweden treat the pandemic today? What are peoples' attitudes like?

Daniel: It's been a long time since I heard anything on the news. People around me tell me that they're sick all the time and it's not like it used to be. COVID fucks up the immune system. It's been memory holed and totally gaslit. However, you can't entirely blame the gaslighting. It's certainly a powerful force, but there's probably a fair deal of licensing from people, accepting things are fucked up. If you want to not care about the pandemic, it is really easy to do. It's not mentioned. It's only visible on the macro level.

Will: That's very unfortunate and similar to our experience now in the United States. Before Omicron, when the Swedish government really let it rip, what did they do before?

Daniel: Before Omicron they had no widespread mask mandates. There was no differentiation between surgical masks and respirators. I've learned later that the initial guidance from public health was to use respirators, not surgical masks, but actual decent respirators. For some reason they withdrew it and I think that's when they decided to let-it-rip. I don't think much of the public knew about those recommendations early on.

They had stuff like bars closing earlier and a maximum number of people allowed in certain places. They did have mask mandates in care settings and elder care and such, and there's still surgical masks in elder care. I went to the hospital with my son last week for surgery and I didn't see a single mask except for in the operating room. I think that's been the case for over a year at least.

As things went off the rails they drastically changed the testing procedures. That was around February or March 2022, but then testing just went away. Then in the spring, they were able to use the magically low case counts to vote COVID over. If you look at official cases now, even during a wave, the number of cases is thousands in a population of ten million. Now to get a PCR test, we can only get tested at travel vaccine clinics for about $100 USD unless you are in the hospital and the doctor thinks it’s COVID or you’re deemed vulnerable and receiving care. At one point, these travel clinics required you to be symptom free to get tested.

Will: Regarding the internal emails of Anders Tegnell (mentioned earlier in this piece), the State Epidemiologist during the initial phase of the pandemic, do people generally accept the narrative that the Swedish government intentionally infected children to build herd immunity?

Daniel: Yes, at least among those that care about it. A lot of people will go, we could have done better but at least it's over. It's accepted that the approach to herd immunity was intentional. A lot of it they did to protect capital. Even liberal people around me have expressed this. Yet, there's no outrage. It's really weird what's happening.

Anders Tegnell is a government servant and the government hid behind him because he's just an employee. They have published some government recommendations that you're free to follow, but people can just choose to not follow them. They've been hiding behind each other and no one has been responsible. Even the media has published how well Sweden has done and compared us to other countries with entirely different demographics. We are sold as a success story when we have done essentially nothing. It's gonna be a long and hard work to make some progress, but I'll try to some extent.

Will: Why do you think that the left in Sweden has been ineffective on this issue?

Daniel: That's a really hard question. In parliament, it's easy. We have not one, but two bourgeois labor parties. For them it's personal. There's also this, that Swedes have this feeling that Sweden is the envy of the world. Up until the 1980s, we did have a strong social movement. We accomplished a lot in the class struggle. Since the '80s, the Social Democratic Party adopted a liberal party program. In 30 years, we have gone back 50 years in terms of the income gap.

The Swedish response to COVID was hailed by the left in some manner. They've been going in on "freedom" talk. When people were talking COVID in the spring of '22, even the Left Party of the bourgeoisie, they used to call themselves communists (the "Left Party Communists" were renamed to "Left Party"), were saying we shouldn't have all this infringement on our way of life. We shouldn't have all these disease control measures—they called them "restrictions." It's newspeak. The Left Party also went in on "restrictions," saying we should increase spending on healthcare so we can live our lives and be free. Freedom is having no responsibility.

We had a constitutional crisis in 2021 and the government before that, the Left Party was part, and not a lot happened. The social democrats ruled alone, so the opposition controlled the budget and now we have a right wing coalition ruling. The Left Party only has 7% of the vote (Ed.: At the time of the interview, the Left Party in Sweden held 24 out of 349 seats in the Riksdag). The thing with healthcare is that it's not national government, it's regional. It's divided between different coalitions. The government should be able to do something you know?  We've had a lot of cuts in Stockholm, during the mask mandate period. The previous local government was right-wing, but now there's a left-center coalition and I don't think they are doing anything to remedy it, but I haven't been paying attention to the local politics. The trend the last couple of decades has been cutting.

Will: What about the communist parties outside of government?

Daniel: That's what really gets me. The common conception is that Sweden is a bit better than most places and they know it as well as we do. If we're doing one thing in Sweden and they're doing it differently in other places, a lot of people will think well they don't know any better. People in authority say we're gonna do this and that's the right thing to do and people go on and believe that. Socialism went away 40 years ago.

I have an American acquaintance that said something that expresses the "Swedish image" (sverigebliden) really well: "America sucks, but I can get a solid fraction of Americans to agree that America sucks. If I tell Swedes that Sweden's coronavirus policy is genocide, they will gut me except for like three [people] that post on SA [Something Awful] (Ed.: Something Awful is an internet forum with an active COVID-19-Conscious Subcommunity)."

I'll tell party comrades that what made me realize we need action and political activism and political work is the pandemic. I describe that as my real entry point to activism as we can't leave it to the elected. Most of them just look at me in a weird way. Even the small radical parties don't really see a problem with it. Disease has always been around and that's been the perception of it.

The Socialist Justice Party (the Swedish section of the International Socialist Alternative) has in their party program at least one paragraph about disease control in the workplace. In the congress for our party next year, and I plan to get it into our party program as well. We'll see. There's certainly a case to be made about the material conditions making it social murder.

Will: Sweden is a remarkable country for many reasons, but in the context of the pandemic, it has been remarkable for being the first developed country to "let-it-rip". What was that experience like for you? How do you contextualize it? Why do you think Sweden was so quick to let it rip?

Daniel: I think it has something to do with lobbyists. I think it was around that time that people started getting really loud about the economic impact. The mainstream media is owned by about two companies and people started being let go from their jobs. Neoliberalism doesn't doesn't allow for state intervention and so the mainstream media did their masters' bidding and told everyone that we can't have disease control measures.

It's becoming increasingly clear how much leverage, just how strong the lobbies are. They are really active and powerful. A remarkable number of politicians from the Social Democratic party have gone to become lobbyists. The lobbyists are mostly politicians or are connected to them. There's a lot of discussion about the privatization of schools that has been going on for decades. The quality of the education has been going down, cost going up.

In surveys, only 6% of the population support unregulated profiteering from schools. Nothing is being done to counter it. With privatization, but also with COVID as well, the lobbies have more power than the people do.

There was also pretty recently, a book released, but I haven't read it (Ed.: The book is “De gränslösa: en bok om politikers skolaffärer” translated: “The Borderless: A Book About Politicians' School Affairs” by Marcus Larsson and Åsa Plesner). The meetings between politicians, lobbyists, also included journalists that were instructed how to approach this. The centralized media was important in guiding the COVID response.

Public healthcare is also getting less funding, and a certain degree of that is due to the private practices. Those places are siphoning off all the competent personnel. A lot of the public is losing the opportunity for good healthcare, and it's anti-worker as well.

Will: If we don't address the pandemic, what do you think the consequences will be?

Daniel: We're already beginning to see some right? We're seeing labor shortages. I haven't checked the latest labor statistics, but the job openings went straight up for a while. I don't know if the recession, or what should be a recession, has modified that yet.

I recently checked the birth rates. Since 2014, they haven't varied more than 2% year-to-year. Never. Between 2021 to 2022, they dropped 8.5% and in the first part of 2023, they dropped 6.5% on top of that. That won't be visible for about 20 years. We have that and these increasing rates of disability. I don't know what that will do to workplace accidents and accidents in general.

I have the statistics open, and you can see that COVID deaths are not receding anymore. The baseline is higher. It's mostly the elderly, that's still not okay. You've probably seen the studies, it'll probably start creeping down the ages as people age from COVID as well.

Will: In the U.S. state of Iowa, there was a new law passed to increase the amount of child labor. Have you seen anything like that where you live?

Daniel: Either the consequences are visible already or they're planning for it, but I think the labor shortage probably has a part in stuff like child labor. I haven't seen any push for child labor here yet. We still have a pool of unemployed and underemployed in Sweden. We have enough surplus labor at the moment, at least in less qualified jobs.

I used to work as a mechanic, a truck mechanic, and the demand was really high. It took half a year of training and you didn’t even have to look for a job. I had colleagues who were approached by employers without looking. 

All sorts of those occupations, like plumbers, HVAC, mechanics, etc. are in huge demand. The stimulus is running out and things are slowing down with the increased interest rates and shit. The next update will be interesting to see. I will be surprised if there is no disability in that curve.

This is not a reality you want to accept where you can't do stuff like you used to. With some measures from government, you could get damn close. Masking in some areas, filtration and ventilation and others you could go out eating and such. With a mask you can be pretty safe.

Will: Thank you for your time Daniel. That was a very informative perspective.