The head of the Public Health Agency of Sweden (FHM) has been accused of inflating the number of hateful emails his agency has received over the agency’s handling of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Director-General of the Public Health Agency of Sweden Johan Carlson claimed last month that threats toward FHM staff, particularly coronavirus response head Anders Tegnell, had become so severe that the agency required police protection.
After requesting access to the emails sent to the agency, the Swedish journal Kvartal has reported that after looking at a cache of messages received by the agency in December of last year, just ten per cent could be classified as hateful. Just one per cent were found to contain words that could constitute a possible threat.
The journal tasked an expert security analyst to view the emails and he concluded that ten per cent may fall under the category of hate, and ten per cent were unintelligible and “irrational”. The remaining 80 per cent, the analyst found, were simply individual opinions and messages containing “objective criticism”.
The emails are also said to refute Carlson’s claims that many of the “hateful” messages came from anonymous senders as many of the emails are said to have been signed off with the authors’ real names.
Sweden has been one of the worst affected Scandinavian countries by the Wuhan coronavirus since the start of the pandemic last year and took a different approach to its neighbours by largely remaining open with few lockdown restrictions.
Last year, Poland’s government harshly criticised the Swedish approach to the coronavirus, with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki going as far as labelling it “Darwinian.”
“The world’s richest countries have started to choose which patients should receive care and which should not receive care. This is because of the lack of hospital beds, respirators, no proper equipment and no medical personnel. This so-called Swedish model, a Darwinian model, we have not even thought of introducing,” he said.
Sweden’s attitude to the pandemic has drastically shifted in recent months, with the government passing legislation that allows lawmakers to close businesses and implement more restrictions than previously possible.