It seems that all this talk about Sweden influenced the decision in Downing Street. A recent report in the Sunday Times suggested that Johnson prefers not to draw up a power outage in September following a meeting with Chancellor Rishi Sunak and three proponents of a herd immunity strategy: Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan from the University of Oxford and Anders Tegnell, the epidemiologist behind Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic. (When openDemocracy asked for details about Tegnell’s correspondence with the prime minister’s office), it was said that any release could jeopardize the formulation of government policy.)
The ubiquity of controversial voices over Covid has contributed to Boris Johnson’s well-documented tendency toward indecision. As someone knows what the prime minister wants to influence, he will often do nothing if faced with a variety of choices. The delay in imposing restrictions in England after the meeting with Tegnell and Co in September, led to an estimated 1.3 million extra Covid infections.
The rhetoric surrounding the Swedish model – and herd immunity – created the scene for Britain to weaken restrictions faster than scientists, or even the public, wanted. We were even offered a financial incentive to spread the one thing we’ve always known about the virus: mixing indoors. The image of a maskless Rishi Sunak serving meals in a London Wagamama to launch August’s “eat-out-to-help” initiative has not yet aged. (Research suggests that the scheme directly contributed to an increase in infections.)