Back in February 2020: "There's no need to wear masks. Feel free to use the subway."
Quotes might be a bit off, but Fauci's words basically amounted to this
I've seen people try to write this off as "not wanting to start a panic" and "trying to secure masks for hospitals" but that's just a copout.
If they'd initiated a lockdown sooner millions of people wouldn't have died. They killed them on purpose because they were elderly and didn't serve the machine. Also millions of people wouldn't have gotten long-COVID with nearly as bad a viral load.
Sweden had more official COVID deaths than any other nordic country (25% higher than Finland which had second most, and over 5x Iceland which had the least). IIRC their excess deaths is even worse than that but idk.
Also, while Sweden relied largely on softer "suggestions", the populace was also way, way more accepting of those measures than in eg the US.
The joke was that they couldn't wait for 2 m distancing to be over so they could go back to 5.