ABSTRACT
Scientists have for a long time explicitly warned about the risks of dangerous zoonoses, since they cause major public health problems that have long been underestimated. Such spill overs should have raised our awareness about the significance of human-animal relations and livelihoods in the context of accelerating dangerous environmental and climatic change. Nevertheless societies were obviously not prepared. Will we remember the years of 2020–22 as a rupture, not simply as a crisis that fades past but as an era of entering the pandemic century?
The introductory chapter expounds the reasons for considering Sweden’s pandemic management within the surrounding global context, by approaching the pandemic emergency in a variety of academic fields of life science, social science, and the humanities. One of the first internationally published critical articles in the New York Times described the Swedish strategy in terms of a biopolitical experiment where the decision-makers had chosen to expose the innocent citizens to a deadly and at the time unknown virus. The rationale behind the country’s national strategy, which appeared to be focused on achieving herd immunity in the quickest way possible, is the reason why the authors of this book have chosen to describe the pandemic response as Sweden’s pandemic experiment.
The chapter unfolds in detail the multiplicity of observations, issues, and analyses that make Sweden’s Sonderweg (special path) so tremendously significant. Why did Sweden attract attention as “the world’s cautionary tale”, and why did many interpret its way as a “disaster” while others, still today and in spite of thousands of avoidable deaths, praise its success, compared to other countries?
The chapter offers an elaborated survey of the state of knowledge, by presenting and discussing a large and rich diversity of sources in media, science, political evaluations, and books. It gives shape to an agenda of the most significant issues, and concludes with detailed summaries of each following chapter.
