A Swedish professor of epidemiology has stopped investigating COVID-19 after facing severe setbacks over its findings that the disease poses a low threat to children – undermining the political argument that schools cannot reopen.
Jonas Ludvigsson, a professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute, said he had lost sleep due to the “malicious messages via social media and email” that his study encountered and partly blamed him for Sweden ‘s controversial COVID-19 strategy, the College Fix reports.
His research focused on children aged 1 to 16 during the first wave of the pandemic last spring, including those with ‘laboratory-verified or clinically verified COVID-19, including patients admitted for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children’ because it probably related to the error.
Only 15 children went to the ICU – a rate of 0.77 per 100,000, according to the report. Four had “an underlying chronic condition” and no one died.
As for teachers, “less than” 30 ended up in the ICU during the same period – a rate of about 19 per 100,000.
Ludvigsson also noted that children do not wear face masks, while the rest of Swedish citizens are simply ‘encouraged’ to distance themselves socially.
Due to the setback Ludvigsson faced over his research, Sweden plans to promote academic freedom protection in law, according to the College Fix.
Higher Education Minister Matilda Ernkrans told the British Medical Journal that the government intends to amend the Higher Education Act to ensure that “education and research are protected so that people can freely discover, investigate and share knowledge . “
The president of Karolinska Institutet, Ole Petter Ottersen, told the magazine that ‘hateful and ridiculous accusations and personal attacks cannot be tolerated’, either against the pediatrician or other researchers who ‘withdraw'[ed] from the public debate after being threatened or harassed. ”
Ludvigsson said his letter to the editor, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 18, had undergone several revisions and ‘formal external peer review’, including statistics.