Annika Linde, a Swedish physician and virologist who served from 2005 to 2013 as State Epidemiologist at the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control, on Monday broke rank with the public health establishment in her country to announce she had changed her mind as a result of Sweden’s high death toll compared with the other Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and Finland.
“I think that we needed more time for preparedness. If we had shut down very early … we would have been able, during that time, to make sure that we had what was necessary to protect the vulnerable,” Linde told the Observer.
