“When the next pandemic comes knocking — and it will — we must be ready to answer decisively, collectively, and equitably,” World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a packed assembly in Geneva on May 25. He made his remarks twenty days after the WHO stopped classifying the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency.

As we enter this new phase of the pandemic and survey the destruction the SARS-CoV-2 virus has wrought on global health and livelihoods over the past three years, we are left with more questions than answers. Many of these questions have serious implications for how we react to threats to our collective existence going forward, with the realities of our age of chronic crisis becoming clearer with each passing year, as heat records are broken, wildfires ravage the landscape and choke our air, and the environment progressively becomes more hostile to human life on this planet.

In this context, figuring out the most effective ways for us to face shared crisis together, in solidarity, is arguably one of the most important tasks that the global left faces. Here, the infamous case of the Swedish response to the pandemic stands as a stark example — and a cautionary tale. How did a country ruled by a social democratic party, supported by the Left Party in parliament, and nominally committed to legislating egalitarian and proworker policies end up being the poster child for an approach to the pandemic based on mass infection and natural herd immunity — an approach which left the working class and marginalized segments of society to fend for themselves as a deadly and unknown virus swept through the population?