Critics slam letter in prestigious journal that downplayed COVID-19 risks to Swedish schoolchildren

But Science has learned that another complaint sent to NEJM makes a more serious allegation: that the authors deliberately left out key data that contradicted their conclusion.

The complaint comes from Bodil Malmberg, a private citizen in Vårgårda, Sweden. She used the country’s open records law to obtain email correspondence between Ludvigsson and Swedish chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, the architect of the country’s pandemic policies, that shed light on how the paper came about.  Malmberg says she requested the emails because the data in the NEJMpaper “did not add up.” 

But the emails obtained by Malmberg show that in July 2020, Ludvigsson wrote to Tegnell that “unfortunately we see a clear indication of excess mortality among children ages 7-16 old, the ages where ‘kids went to school.’” For the years 2015 through 2019, an average of 30.4 children in that age group died in the four spring months; in 2020, 51 children in that age group died, “= excess mortality +68%,” Ludvigsson wrote. The increase could be a fluke, he wrote, especially because the numbers are small. Deaths in 1- to 6-year-olds were below average during the same period, so combining the age groups helped even out the increase, he noted.

It wasn’t clear what caused the jump in mortality in 2020; Ludvigsson asked whether Tegnell could help track down the causes of death, which Ludvigsson said would take too long for him to do because of ethical restrictions. Ludvigsson told Science he and his colleagues still have not been able to determine how most children died in the spring of 2020; he says those data were requested from the National Board of Health and Welfare but aren’t available yet.

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