To refer to Sweden as a good example of care and welfare reforms has been common among many US scholars all through the 1990s until today. In this article, the author tries to understand why the Swedish pandemic strategy during 2020–21 was met with surprise and confusion, most visible in the US where the political divide between for-or-against lockdown, that is, for or against free access to public spaces, made the right-wing refer to Sweden in positive terms. In Sweden it was the extreme right-wing party, the Swedish Democrats (founded by neo-Nazis), that expressed an explicit belief in complete lockdowns, while in the United States it was the Democrats and the liberal left.