New York Times uses Swedish team’s dataset to fact-check podcaster Joe Rogan’s claims

After the Spotify controversy over popular podcaster Joe Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious disease expert with controversial views, New York Times tapped on a dataset prepared by the Swedish teams Tobias Olofsson and Andreas Vilhelmsson. In the podcast, Rogan and Malone claimed that Sweden had not imposed any restrictions on its citizens in response to the pandemic and just let them make decisions for themselves. US’s newspaper of record relied on Olofsson and Vilhelmsson’s timeline of Sweden’s policy response to the pandemic to debunk this often repeated myth, characterizing Sweden’s approach as laissez faire. You can read the NYT story here and access the timeline here.

Olofsson reviews Legal Rules in a Crisis (2020) in Sociologisk Forskning

Tobias Oloffson of the Sweden team published a review of Legal Rules in a Crisis by Johan Hirschfeldt and Olof Petersson. The book asks what kind of democratic decision-making a crisis requires and how it differs from “peace-time” political processes. Olofsson’s review emphasized that pandemics necessitate overriding the slow decision-making processes in favor of swift crisis management.
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