Professor quits COVID research after hostility to findings

A Swedish professor of epidemiology has quit researching COVID-19 after facing a fierce backlash over his findings that the illness poses a low threat to children – undermining the political argument that schools can’t reopen, writes Yaron Steinbuch for the New York Post.

Jonas Ludvigsson, a professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute, said he has lost sleep as a result of the “angry messages through social media and email” assailing his study and partly blaming him for Sweden’s contrarian COVID-19 strategy, The College Fix reported. His research focused on children ages one to 16 during the first wave of the pandemic last spring, including those with “laboratory-verified or clinically verified COVID-19, including patients who were admitted for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children” because it’s “likely” related to the virus. Only 15 children went to the ICU – a rate of 0.77 per 100,000, according to the report. Four had “an underlying chronic coexisting condition” and none died.

Due to the backlash Ludvigsson faced over his research, Sweden plans to boost academic freedom protections in law, according to The College Fix. Higher Education Minister Matilda Ernkrans told the British Medical Journal that the government is planning to amend the Higher Education Act to ensure “that education and research must be protected to enable people to freely discover, research and share knowledge”.
Full report on the New York Post site