The Swedish government has said it will strengthen laws on academic freedom after a prominent Swedish academic, Jonas F Ludvigsson, dropped out of Covid-related research and debates over attacks after publishing a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine with a study showing that few Swedish children fell ill with covid-19 in the first wave .
The same dog with a different collar
Ludvigsson, a pediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and a professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute, published a study showing that relatively few children in Sweden got sick from covid. Sweden was one of the few countries that kept schools and pre-schools open during the spring of 2020, so the data was among the first collected on risks to children .
This is not a new phenomenon, but we have seen an increase in threats against academics related to coronavirus research. When people are silenced, it is a threat to freedom of expression and our democracy. Be it from whoever it is .
To reinforce academic freedom, the Swedish government has proposed a new amendment stating that education and research must be protected to allow people to freely discover, research and share knowledge.
As Petter Ottersen , president of the Karolinska Institute, where Ludvigsson is Professor, explained:
In a situation with so many unknowns, it is more important than ever that opinions are expressed and experts heard, even if their opinions are contrary to current policies.
Other very tribal or partisan issues at the political level also censor and restrict the freedom of researchers if their results contradict the dominant group, from issues of a sexual nature to rates of violence. Cultural cancellation is also common .
Of course, this is just one more manifestation that people, in general, do not want freedom of expression: they want it for those who agree with them, but they will always draw a red line or a sanitary cordon for those who wield opinions that they have determined as monstrous. The case of rapper Pablo Hásel and his media resonance is a good example of this, as you can see in the following video: