The Swedish state is condemned for propaganda against vaccine critics

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Published 15 March 2023 at 14.13

Domestic. The Finnish-Swedish vaccine critic Linda Karlström was singled out as anti-Semitic and extremist in a documentary in SVT. Now she gets justice against the Swedish state, which is ordered to pay 100,000 kroner in damages to Karlström.

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“Documents from the inside: The vaccine warriors” was shown in December 2020 in SVT, and the documentary series is still available on SVT Play.

In the documentary, two journalists scrutinize the anti-vaccine movement in, among other places, the Nordics and the USA by “wall-raffing”.

Finnish-Swedish Linda Karlström from Kronoby is one of the people the journalists interviewed and who is portrayed in the documentary. In their contacts with her, the journalists pretended to be vaccine critics themselves who were going to make a documentary about the risks of vaccines. During the recording period, Karlström knew neither the real identities of the journalists nor the actual purpose of the interviews.

She was also secretly filmed on several occasions when she said things that the journalists later described in the documentary as anti-Semitic and extremist.

p>In May 2021, Linda Karlström reported SVT's responsible publisher for defamation to the Chancellor of Justice, who quickly decided not to initiate a preliminary investigation. The “vaccine warriors” were also reported to the Review Board, which cleared the program in October 2021.

During the trial in the Stockholm district court, Linda Karlström argued that she was subjected to character assassination by the Swedish state, according to Vasabladet.

And with today's verdict, she is right. According to the district court, the state has violated Linda Karlström's right to privacy according to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). distribution and still remains on SVT Play. It is clear that Linda Karlström has taken offense to the publication and the approach used to obtain the material that was published,” writes the Stockholm district court.

Overall, the district court considers that reasonable compensation for the non-profit damage that Linda Karlström thus suffered amounts to SEK 100,000. However, she must pay her own legal costs because the court considers that she submitted such a large amount of evidence, concerning vaccines among other things, that it “unnecessarily burdened the case”.