CORRECTION - Regarding Anders Tegnell's Correspondence With Ivor "FatEmperor" Cummins
It's even worse than you thought.
PROFILE: Anders Tegnell, Former Swedish State Epidemiologist
Occasionally, we all make mistakes as human beings, and it's worth calling them out and setting things straight. Regarding our recent profile on Anders Tegnell, due to a misreading of Swedish language e-mails between Anders and colleagues, there was some confusion that Tegnell was in direct correspondence with Irish-born social media conspiracy theorist Ivor 'FatEmperor' Cummins. This was not true, according to the evidence we have, and the mistake was pointed out by a Swedish reader.
The reality is in fact, much worse. According to the records we have, Tegnell was not in direct correspondence with Ivor Cummins, who frequently profited on social media by proclaiming that a mass-infection end to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was constantly right around the corner as a rallying cry against public health measures which Ivor would compare to the genocidal Third Reich.
Anders Tegnell was, as far as we know, simply a fanboy of a far-right conspiracy theorist he follows on Youtube. Swedish taxpayer dollars were going to some irresponsible brat goofing off on social media all day, stinking up the office of the State Epidemiologist, instead of doing his actual goddamned job. This should be a major scandal, especially now that Tegnell is releasing books and selling lectures completely misrepresenting himself and the countless failures of the pandemic response he brags about overseeing.
Of course, for failed med student and anti-vax grifter Kevin Bass, who experienced the pandemic from a Call of Duty lobby in Texas, Bass has only doubled down on selling a completely fictional delusion that America, a nation of 330+ million people stretched between two oceans, with vastly different population health variables than the 10 million Nordic country of Sweden, should have followed Tegnell's lead as hospitals with actual doctors, something Kevin Bass will never be, were overwhelmed and crashing in early 2020.
Any serious comparison between the United States of America and Sweden's respective pandemic performances would be forced to reckon with the fact that due to public health regulations (some guided by the European Union), a single-payer healthcare system that does not drive the public to avoid routine and preventative medical care, stricter rules on food production, and other various factors left Sweden's population of 10 million in much better health to shoulder the burden of a once-in-a-century pandemic disaster than the population of America, which has suffered under decades of deregulation and a brutal privatized health-denial system - the reality is that a more hands-off, “libertarian” to public health approach contributes to worse outcomes in a pandemic disaster.
Of course, carny hacks like Anders Tegnell, Kevin Bass, and their fellow cohorts on social media aren't interested in serious, adult conversations about complicated, highly technical issues that exist in the real world, outside of the screen they hide behind as they rot their minds with reactionary garbage. Taking real world science, tossing it in the bin, and performing "easy answers" for an audience of easily-deceived marks looking to not just justify, but rebrand irresponsibility in a global disaster as a noble act of heroism, is far more seductive and profitable than taking your job (or education, in Kevin's regard) seriously.
Credit to Harvard for what is hopefully the start of a larger trend dismissing the chronically incorrect, starting with Martin Kulldorff of the Great Barrington Declaration for his anti-vax quackery, as detailed in Science Based Medicine.
