ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the discrepancy between empirical evidence on immunity levels and statements from Swedish authorities. The author discusses evidence of infectious mortality, IFR, which was presented in the Spring and Summer of 2020, internationally and from Sweden. This evidence pointed to a very high IFR for high-income countries, around 1 per cent, which would entail 50–100,000 deaths in Sweden. This evidence is contrasted with the assessments of representatives and certain employees of FHM, which shows how they downplayed the empirical evidence selectively to claim that Sweden, or at least Stockholm, would soon gain herd immunity. These claims implicated that Sweden would need to have a much greater spread of infection than the Western European countries and a much lower IFR. These extremely unrealistic assumptions legitimized the belief in natural herd immunity as a central part of Sweden’s experiments, that is, a strategy to allow the healthy part of the population to be infected at a rate that would not overburden health care, while isolating so-called risk groups. The reason why Sweden did not have higher mortality levels is that the original strategy had to de facto be abandoned when death rates started to rise.
