By Johan Anderberg From The Weekend Australian Magazine March 25, 2022
8 MINUTE READ

On Friday, March 6, 2020, three doctors in their sixties arrived at an inconspicuous building near Stockholm in Sweden. It was already late in the afternoon. The first doctor was Jan Albert. He was the leader. Albert was a professor in infectious-disease control at the Karolinska Institute. He was the one who had set up the meeting. The second was Johan von Schreeb. He was the celebrity. Von Schreeb was a storm chaser who would get on a plane as soon as disaster struck anywhere in the world. Way back in 1993, he had founded the Swedish section of Doctors Without ­Borders; in 2014, he had been named "Swede of the Year" by the news and ­current affairs magazine Fokus. The third was Denis ­Coulombier. He was the Frenchman. Until the year before, Coulombier had been head of the preparedness and response unit at the European Centre for Disease ­Prevention and Control, headquartered in Sweden. Now he was retired, but remained an authority.