This is so, so stupid. The world has a limited number of fragile, deeply flawed but utterly necessary coordination mechanisms. To throw one of them aside in a fit of pique is the act of an angry toddler, smashing things he doesn’t understand.
How in the world can you really say or think that? This was the WHO's official stance in January 2020: "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan"
If that isn't clear evidence that they are beyond useless, then I don't know what is.
The WHO declared coronavirus a global health emergency in January. Meanwhile Trump said “We have it totally under control” in January. Which of those perspectives proved true?
Taking that quote at face value: at the time, they trusted the Chinese authorities. This isn't terribly unreasonable. I think in retrospect we can say, yeah, they obviously shouldn't have trusted the Chinese authorities then, and they definitely shouldn't trust them in the future. But at the time, the idea that trusting them was a bad idea was more a thing people said than something backed by solid evidence.
Alas, sometimes large bureaucracies take a while to catch up with common sense. (See also, fax machines).
There actually is solid, undeniable evidence now, which is great! Let's see how they apply that in the future.
'Health officials in Taipei said they alerted the WHO at the end of December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries.'
'Q&A with HK microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung who helped confirm coronavirus' human spread
Tell us what you saw in Wuhan (on 17th Jan).
Let me tell you what I think is the truth. All the places we visited in Wuhan looked like they were putting on a show. Whatever we asked them, they answered as if they had prepared hard with well-thought-out replies. However, Zhong Nanshan was extremely sharp - he kept asking follow-up questions, like: "Is there anything else?" "Are there any more cases?" "Is it really like you're saying, just that many cases?"
Eventually, under pressure, they relented and told us it seemed that there was one patient in the neurosurgery department who had infected 14 medical workers. But they also said those medical staff had not had their diagnoses confirmed.
...
We met a deputy-level national leader and officials from the National Health Commission. They were all quite frank. Our expert group reported that the situation was severe, and there must have been cases of human transmission, and that preventive measures needed to be taken immediately.'
> 'Health officials in Taipei said they alerted the WHO at the end of December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries.'
> “Why did the WHO Ignore an email from Taiwanese health officials in late December alerting them to the possibility that coronvirus could be transmitted between humans?” the president asked in a tweet on Friday, echoing a claim made by Taipei.
> However, the Taiwanese email appears to have made no such warning. It was sent from Taiwan’s CDC to its WHO liaison officer on 31 December, hours after the first official report of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan were published online.
> According to the text provided to the Guardian, the email said: “News resources today indicate that at least seven, atypical pneumonia cases were reported in China.”
> It restates the details of Chinese report, adding “I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us.”
> The email did not contain new information, and certainly nothing about human-to-human transmission. The WHO had picked up the same report on the night of 30 December and was urgently seeking more information. On 1 January it activated its incident management support team, putting the organisation on an emergency footing.
I feel like this whole "it said/it said" thing with all these various organizations and their shifting messages is going to take years, at least, to disentangle.
'The officials said doctors in Taiwan had learned from their colleagues in mainland China that medical staff were falling ill from the as-yet unnamed coronavirus, a sign of human-to-human transmission that Taiwan says it passed on to the WHO and Chinese authorities on December 31. However, the WHO did not communicate the information with other nations.'
So I guess it comes down to semantics; whether a mention of atypical cases and request for confirmation is effectively a warning - or not.
Whatever the interpretation, it seems like the lack of response from the WHO to that email indicates the WHO were in the dark at the time, or not willing to share what they had. If the former then the email could be said to have formed a warning of some kind.
I love how The Guardian tries to twist the facts in the service of an anti Trump screed. Personally I feel the report from Reuters was far more balanced (it doesn't even mention Trump)
Here was the email Taiwan sent to the WHO at the end of December:
“News sources today indicate that at least seven cases of atypical pneumonia were reported in Wuhan, China. Her health authorities responded to the media that they did not believe the cases were SARS; however, the examples are still under study and the cases were isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much for your attention in this matter. ”
Taiwan did so well because they knew that Chinese authorities couldn't be trusted; and they shared their info with WHO that they suspected human-to-human transmission very early, only for it to be ignored. There was plenty of reason to not trust Chinese authorities, they have an obvious track record
Suppose you made a list of all of the scandals or dumb things that a given state government or federal agency had been involved in, and then said it should be abolished. That's not a normal thing; nobody would take you seriously.
You can only act on the evidence and information you have, and they were wrong in early January. Being wrong isn't necessarily a sign of uselesness, even the most useful are sometimes wrong.
But on January 30th, WHO said there was human to human transmission, and it was dangerous, officially declared a public health emergency.
At what point would you say CDC started taking it seriously?
The WHO isn't an intelligence agency who has analysts reviewing "based on the Chinese response, we think something is going on other than what they say, and should alert the world to it." That's not what their job is, they should not be faulted for not doing it.
The alarm was not being widely sounded by anyone but the WHO before then either. (Actual nation states DO have intelligence agencies who could have been analyzing this threat, btw).
However, on January 30th when they did sound the alarm -- countries that paid attention to this and took the threat seriously then are, still, doing much better than countries that waited months to take it seriously, or which still aren't taking it seriously. This shows that the WHO in fact did something useful.
The U.S. pulling out of the WHO is meant to distract from the fact that U.S. didn't take it seriously even when the WHO did sound the alarm, somehow blaming the WHO for the U.S. ignoring the WHO. Eliminating the WHO and having no world health organization at all wouldn't fix this problem, and would harm rather than help the global capacity for pandemic response. Perhaps they should have sent out an alarm earlier and not doing so was some kind of incomptency (I'm not convinced, but perhaps), but they still in fact played an important role and did send out the alarm far far before the U.S. paid any attention to it; sending out the alarm earlier wouldn't have made much difference for the US, we would have just had more time to ignore it.
I mean, I guess if the U.S. took the money they were giving to the WHO and instead spent it on re-funding the infectious disease monitoring and research in China that we used to fund but stopped at least that would sound like trying to improve monitoring efficacy (whether it's a wise way to do it or not), instead of just bullshit. But we all know that's the opposite of what is happening, in fact, they recently cancelled MORE US-funded research on infectious diseases in China.
Your response seems knee-jerk in consideration of the actor more than the action.
If President Obama had made a statement saying, “Today we are taking the grave but necessary step of withdrawing from the WHO due to their not being an effective advocate for their mandate.” would you have the same instant reaction?
As a centrist myself, the country seems so hyper partisan with neither side willing to give a millimeter. Sometimes though it’s right to disband an organization if it isn’t doing the job it is meant to. I don’t know whether the WHO was or wasn’t but maybe this action isn’t anymore “so so stupid” than disbanding the League of Nations at the end of World War II. I don’t see any reasons for this being stupid in your post other than ad hominem attacks and namecalling against the actor.
> If President Obama had made a statement saying, “Today we are taking the grave but necessary step of withdrawing from the WHO due to their not being an effective advocate for their mandate.” would you have the same instant reaction?
What if: the fact that he wouldn’t have (and didn’t) do that is part of the reason he is so popular?
Otherwise, what you’re saying is: “sure, maybe what he did was bad, but if someone else had done a bad thing, they would be bad, too!” Which, okay, but they didn’t, and imagining someone else doing something bad doesn’t excuse people actually doing bad things.
> Sometimes though it’s right to disband an organization if it isn’t doing the job it is meant to. I don’t know whether the WHO was or wasn’t but maybe this action isn’t anymore “so so stupid” than disbanding the League of Nations at the end of World War II.
Well, part of the problem is that, no matter how much you interpret the WHO to have bungled up things (maybe a lot!), our federal government has still bungled it up far worse. So a lot of the reaction is that, we’re replacing the WHO with a disaster.
In order to do their job effectively, the WHO needs access to populations that live under a dictatorship. You can very reasonably argue that the WHO should be more open and transparent, but they need to be very careful about how they operate inside of authoritarian states. China could simply pull out of the WHO and then the organization would lose visibility into a huge chunk of the world population. It's a difficult balance to strike. That's just realpolitik.
Instead, the United States is doing China the favor of pulling out so China doesn't have to. This gives China more control over the WHO. Ultimately, as the US abandons its position of global leadership it allows China to take on the mantle. This is a boon to the Chinese communist party.
If Obama had pulled out of the WHO during an epidemic I would think this is a supremely irresponsible decision. Though I will admit that if it were Obama making this decision I might suspect there could be factors that aren't known to the general public, rather than just narcissistic boneheaded idiocy.
@WHO has admitted it did not even REPLY to Taiwan officials raising concerns in late DECEMBER over possible human to human transmission in the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. For fear of hurting WHO relationship with China. Answers needed.
Taiwan’s Vice President, the epidemiologist Chen Chien-jen, accuses the @WHO of ignoring Taiwan’s warning on 31 December of the possibility of human-to-human transmission.
I don't know what the cost/benefit ratio is with WHO but as a non-expert, I found the WHO's leadership during this unprecedented times as weak, un-authoritative and frankly misguided/misinformed. Without stirring up conspiracy theories, everyone should watch this WHO official who just hangs up when they're asked about Taiwan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
That makes me think that the whole organization has been bought out and sold off. But, that's just my knee-jerk reaction and a gut feeling.
That said, what's there to pay to be a member? Why not just stay in there like everyone else?
> That said, what's there to pay to be a member? Why not just stay in there like everyone else?
I don't know how much it costs, but there's also the signaling part of being in it (we are implicitly signaling support by being part of the group). That being said, leaving in the middle of the pandemic seems like an odd choice.
What does the US get in return? There is also soft power and other influence that US expects to gain from it besides the raw ROI. The initial assessment is impossible unless we understand the benefit of the membership.
"The WHO has played a leading role in several public health achievements, most notably the eradication of smallpox, the near-eradication of polio, and the development of an Ebola vaccine."
A tiny drop in the bucket of the US budget to keep polio from resurging in the developing world sounds like a decent investment.
They didn't develop an Ebola vaccine. Pharma companies develop vaccines.
Eradication of smallpox was indeed an achievement, however, it was also many decades ago. The modern WHO is different people.
In more recent times, there is a history of problematic behaviour, like changing their own definition of pandemic specifically so they could declare one for a trivial disease (Swine Flu) and then lying about having done so, although archive.org remembers all:
> A randomized trial for the vaccine began during the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2015. When no other organization was positioned to run a trial in Guinea during the complex emergency, the government of Guinea and WHO took the unusual step to lead the trial.
> A global coalition of funders and researchers provided the critical support required. Funders included the Canadian Government (through the Public Health Agency of Canada, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, International Development Research Centre, Global Affairs Canada); the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (through the Research Council of Norway's GLOBVAC programme); the Wellcome Trust; the UK government through the Department for International Development; and Médecins Sans Frontières.
> In the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 236,000 people have been vaccinated with rVSV ZEBOV GP donated by Merck to WHO, including more than 60,000 health and frontline workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi.
The author of the Forbes blog is irrelevant. There are sources cited for the claims made.
Besides, the article you link says a lot of things that are true. Death rates vary according to age, China peaked and declined first, CV affects high risk groups the most (kinda tautological but not really discussed much in early March when it was written), etc. I'm not sure what's so objectionable about it.
According to wikipedia you are more than an order of magnitude off:
"In 2018-19, the EU and its member states contributed 11% of the WHO's $5.6 billion budget, the US contributed 15%, while China contributed 0.2%"
I guess I'm not clear how you're even reading the table. The US paid $115M out of $488M total for 2020. 23% is obviously a large chunk, but the contributions appear to be based on GDP. We have ~23% of the worldwide GDP and pay in ~23% to the WHO.
I don't think you are interpreting those links correctly.
For 2, where I think you pulled the $67/101 million, appears to be the outstanding balance of assessment including what was unpaid over previous periods. Not familiar with the data but that doesn't sound like the required contributions in a year, it just sounds like the US has the biggest unpaid assessed bill.
For 3, I don't see where you obtained those numbers either. The "gross assessment" which I assume is the contribution based on wealth/population is $236 million for the US vs $1076 million total assessed.
Again not familiar with the data, I could be wrong. That's how I am reading those documents though.
Give or take every international organization (and most parts of the US) will have the same reaction if you pressure them to acknowledge Taiwanese independence in that fashion. Excepting the cases where they are not required to interact with PRC at all, or are explicitly setup to deal with that issue.
The U.S. was paying about $400-500 million / year, not an insignificant amount of tax dollars to go to an organization that chose to help China at the U.S.' expense by lying and covering up necessary information.
The great thing about local responses is that many different things can be tried, and different cultures with different viewpoints can be respected. When one organisation 'coordinates' the whole world, everyone can be wrong in unison. There's a lot of evidence that this has been happening with the WHO, but it's not just them.
Some of the most valuable evidence generated in COVID times is from comparing different countries to observe differences based on what they did (or lack of differences).
The WHO is an example of what one world government would look like: not a beatific utopia ruled by neutral and dispassionate experts, but incompetence and disarray unchecked by any sort of accountability. Remember: the WHO isn't run by a doctor but rather a former Ethiopian minister of finance. It has routinely made announcements that not only contradicted other health agencies and researchers but contradicted itself, as of a few weeks earlier.
For example, the WHO's report on non-pharmaceutical interventions prepared in pre-COVID times says:
"Pandemic: Not recommended under any circumstances: contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry/exit screening, border closure"
For a mere epidemic they also don't recommend internal travel restrictions of any sort.
In other words, the WHO recommends against lockdowns. When faced with a virus that spreads in exactly the same way, and which it soon became clear was of similar severity, they haven't gone back and changed their beliefs nor prior advice though.
Because since infectious diseases don't respect borders, coordination across borders is required to control them. For a pandemic, by definition global in reach, global coordination is required.
The WHO has no ability to enforce any standards of practice, and I am not saying it ought to. Sure, if they are recommending against something, there's nothing stopping a local jurisdiction from doing it anyway, if they think their conditions or capacities differ, or they have access to better scientific guidance. They may be making a terrible mistake, or not, so it goes. This is how it is, and it ought not to be any different.
But if you give up on coordination and cross-border mutual aid, and just say that it's every country/state/city/household for themselves to do what they personally decide best inconsistently with all their neighbors... well, how is that working out for the USA right now?
Should we also eliminate the CDC, and let each state do for themselves? And eliminate state depts of health, and let each city do for themselves? I mean, heck eliminate city depts of health too, just let each household do for themselves. Now different "cultures and viewpoints can be respected", right? That DOES seem to be the USA approach at times; it's not working out very well, because of some un-changeable facts about how infectious diseases work.
The OP is blaming the WHO for not supplying the right information in early January. Putting aside an argument about how (un)reasonable a mistake this was to make under the circumstances, if you're complaining that they didn't warn the world when they should have, how is it possibly an improvement to leave every country on their own to figure out the threat level from any part of the globe without coordination? How could that ever work better? If someone is complaining that the WHO didn't warn the world as early as they should, eliminating them so they dont' even exist to fill that role would obviously not produce a different outcome.
I think actually a "let people figure it out" approach has been adopted and the countries that used it are quite successful. This was basically Sweden's stated policy, and Switzerland also stuck mostly to recommendations rather than rules.
What you see across the world is that the population's behaviour is generally ahead of whatever rules or recommendations governments are coming up with. People figure out the risks to themselves and others faster than governments do because the latter are incentivised (or believe they are incentivised) to take a safety über alles approach, and are very easily pushed around by "experts" and journalists, in ways that smaller groups aren't.
Eliminating the CDC - I don't think the CDC has been particularly useful in this event either. Frankly as far as I am concerned governments have made what is now obviously a perfectly normal and trivial virus drastically worse, to the extent that we'd be far better off as a world, and far healthier as a population, if governments had literally done nothing at all. But doing nothing is paradoxically the hardest thing for any government to do. The best way to bring about that outcome is thus to just clear out organisations and government agencies that would otherwise following a road of, "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done", which seems to explain a good 90% of the lockdown absurdities I see on a daily basis.
Sweden has had far more deaths than it's neighbors, and per capita far more than the US -- we'd have like 50% more deaths if we had per capita what Sweden has had. While Sweden has had pretty much as much economic disruption as it's neighbors.
If you want to consider that a successful outcome, I guess that is your perogative.
I am not about arguing it has to be a "rule" enforced by the police rather than a "recommendation". I don't think enforced by the police with penalties is what makes the difference between succesful control or not, that's not what I'm arguing for.
But arguing that not only no international coordination is required but no coordination of any kind, just people acting as their own personal epidimiologists based on what they read on social media... well, let's check back in a couple years and see how we think it's working out.
Firstly, it's not actually true that Sweden had far more deaths than its "neighbours". This is a bizarre form of cherry picking. Look across Europe and Sweden looks unremarkable: there are plenty of nearby countries that went full lockdown and saw far worse results. For this "neighbours" talking point to mean anything would require that physical proximity to Sweden meant something important, but it doesn't.
Secondly, "deaths from COVID" data is all horribly corrupted. It's actually "deaths with COVID" that gets reported, but that isn't obvious because it keeps being mis-labelled. We have no idea how many people have died from COVID. Only total excess deaths seems reliable because it doesn't have a definition that can be tampered with.
Thirdly, the idea that lockdowns are about reducing total deaths with or from COVID is not correct. That was retroactively invented when it became clear what a disastrous policy it is. Nobody claimed they could do that except by ensuring everyone gets healthcare, which is why they were justified on the grounds of preventing hospital overflow and nothing else. If everyone gets access to healthcare then the grounds for intervention evaporate. In Sweden everyone got healthcare, their hospitals were never even stressed. By lockdown's own logic, this proves Sweden's approach was correct. Hence the furious attempts to rewrite history by claiming lockdowns can save lives even when hospitals are quiet.
Sweden is seeing some economic disruption, partly caused by neighbours who cannot accept that they wrecked their own citizen's economy and civil liberties for nothing. Norway has publicly admitted lockdown was a mistake, for example, but has restricted travel from Sweden anyway. And of course the rest of the world committing economic hari-kari simultaneously will inevitably effect Sweden: it doesn't change the correctness of their response.
But arguing that not only no international coordination is required but no coordination of any kind, just people acting as their own personal epidimiologists based on what they read on social media... well, let's check back in a couple years and see how we think it's working out.
We don't need to wait two years. The armchair epidemiologists who argued against lockdown already won completely. There is no remaining argument, no debate to be had. Lockdowns were meant to avoid overflowing hospitals, places that didn't do them didn't see overflowing hospitals. End of story. Why: because every model generated by so-called experts was wrong. Every prediction was false. People were flagging this as a likely outcome immediately once the models were published. The countries that said actually this is trivial and we should do basically nothing, like Sweden and Belarus, have seen average outcomes even by the highly dubious standards of PCR testing. This suggests lockdowns have no effect at all (and which in turn suggests the testing might mostly be measuring noise).
Asking these sorts of political questions to scientists puts them in a difficult position.
If he answers in the affirmative, he pisses off China, and will likely see them retaliate by withdrawing from cooperation at a time when that could have severe impacts on the world's ability to deal with a pandemic.
If he answers in the negative, he pisses off Taiwan, a lot of people, and a lot of countries who are also not willing to stand up to China on this issue.
And what's the benefit for asking this of an epidemiologist. He's not there to give personal political opinions, he's there to be an expert on a specific subject.
As for the rest of the issues - I know you're not specifically saying it, but there's a lot of folks that blame the WHO for not warning people about this, or delaying announcements.
The WHO were quite early in warning that countries should be prepared for this, that there should be greater efforts put in attempting to limit it's spread.
There is some truth that they didn't declare it a pandemic as early as everyone wanted, they had to wait for it to meet official definitions of being a pandemic.
The WHO declaring a pandemic, however, didn't mean countries couldn't act earlier to stop it.
You can't be a 'World Health Organisation' if you refuse to talk about a crucial region of millions of people that had the best response and most important information. It's clearly rotten at the core.
How was it a political question? Taiwan exists. You can have a political position on whether they should exist, but they do. Deal with it.
And they are not currently part of China. (Or, at least, they are not currently governed by the government of the rest of China.) Again, deal with it.
Different governments had different responses, which had different effects. Under the circumstances, to say "we already covered China" is pretty close to dereliction of duty.
Yes, I know China is going to have a hissy fit if anyone admits that Taiwan exists as a separate entity. China needs to stop acting like a five-year-old. I would say that WHO needs to tell China where to get off, except that (in this situation) WHO really needed China's cooperation. That makes this a much more difficult question to answer.
But, in fact, it is China that makes this a political question. The question itself is not inherently political.
The question wasn't "Does Taiwan exist" it was about letting Taiwan join the WHO.
The WHO admitting Taiwan as a member is the same as them coming out and stating that Taiwan is not part of China.
As for whether they're part of China - that's also a political thing.
If you don't believe that, then ask why the US doesn't formally recognise Taiwan as an independent country. Oh, right, because the US Government decided that it was better to keep having access to Chinese markets. The US isn't unique here, most countries don't formally recognise Taiwan either, because it's beneficial for them not to.
OK, I misunderstood one thing. The question wasn't about Taiwan's response to Covid (which WHO had better be able to answer, politics or no politics), it was about Taiwan joining WHO. That is a political question.
But:
> As for whether they're part of China - that's also a political thing.
Yes and no. No, they are not currently part of China. You have two separate governments, neither of which is subordinate to the other. Therefore neither one is part of the other. That's the de facto reality. It's not ambiguous, it's not subjective, and it's not open to interpretation.
But yes, it's political in that both sides claim a de jure unity - they just disagree about who's in charge of it. And it's political for everybody else, because they can't side with Taiwan without upsetting China, and they aren't willing to upset China.
But for China to try to pretend that the de facto situation is other than what it is... hey, we aren't blind, China. We know what the reality of the current situation is, no matter how much they try to pretend that it's something else.
The reporter wasn't stupid, they were hoping for some kind of reaction.
It's not too dissimilar to taunting someone hoping they'll do something you can latch onto.
The lack of reaction / dodging was clearly enough to drive up a shitstorm. Any attempt to acknowledge and answer the question, even in deflecting it, was going to cause more trouble.
> it shows how great power China has over international bodies and it is scary.
It shows how much power China has in general.
Look at Hong Kong. Most countries are doing nothing except making vague statements for peace, at most some are offering refuge for some who want to escape.
> Any attempt to acknowledge and answer the question, even in deflecting it, was going to cause more trouble.
This is certainly not true. WHO lawyer gave later lengthy explanation of WHO position on Taiwan on a press conference and nobody cared. It wasn't the issue of Taiwan that shocked people. Everyone following news knows that UN is politically paralyzed institution.
What was shocking, to me and people I know, was the extend of fear and disingenuity of a member of WHO. He has clearly western roots and we expect from him western political culture. He is the man in authority position who we are supposed to trust. But this behavior was all but trustworthy. He was deceiving. He was laying and he was voluntarily following Chinese party line.
The reporter was not stupid, indeed. It's her job to ask difficult questions.
I applaud her for opening my eyes to the fact that I should trust WHO only about us much as I trust China.
> Look at Hong Kong. Most countries are doing nothing except making vague statements for peace, at most some are offering refuge for some who want to escape.
Again, this is something that I tend to expect. Western states have nothing to gain there and we have no obligations to these 7.5 million people.
> It shows how much power China has in general.
I guess maybe I was naive, but my a prior would be that USA would have a lot more power. The fact that western people are bowing before China in this way is new to me.
As a scientist, some of their public statements have been weird to say the least, in particular the very controversial, poorly-worded and then retracted tweet on immunity.
And then, pausing SOLIDARITY on the HCQ arm because of the flawed Lancet study (granted, they weren't the only ones to fall for it).
Not to mention the fact that the WHO has included TCM in the International Classification of Disease last year (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01726-1) makes the case that they aren't compromised by China more difficult.
That said, Maybe someone can explain why the USA just can't continue to refuse to pay their dues until there is substantial leadership change? My sense here is that this isn't related to an actual desire for better health organizations and more a mechanism for USA leadership to deflect from their own failings.
This is inane, this is throwing the baby with the bath water. The WHO achieved a lot throughout its history[0]. Trying to excuse leaving it out to dry is as stupid as extremely dangerous.
This administration is using the WHO as a scapegoat for its mishandling of the pandemic. But I am for increasing funding to NIH.gov instead of politics ridden WHO. WHO has made this crisis worse with confusion, misinformation and incompetence.
The CDC would be a better analog to WHO. We haven't heard much about them because.... Well, it's a good thing U.S. health organizations haven't also made the crisis worse with politics-ridden confusion, misinformation, and incompetence, right?
But isn't the obvious domestic institution for public health crises/epidemics the CDC, not the NIH? And hasn't the current administration interfered with the CDC's response (including e.g. stopping them from doing their own regular press briefings, removing a leading researcher after he expressed skepticism in response to the president's comments on hydrochloroquine, etc)?
If your complaint is the crisis being made worse by confusion, misinformation and incompetence, I hardly see how removing resources and trying to favor hamstrung American institutions is an improvement.
I don't know, but everybody panicked about the same time and came to the conclusion it was a crisis right about on Friday the 13th. I personally was worrying about why a lot of authorities were dragging their feet that week, but none of them were the WHO.
Maybe take an inventory of where you were and what you were doing and thinking that week?
> I don't know, but everybody panicked about the same time and came to the conclusion it was a crisis right about on Friday the 13th.
The sudden switch was fascinating to me. One theory is Tom Hanks getting it coupled with the NBA shutting down on the 11th turned it from abstract to very concrete for a lot of folks:
Passing a threshold doesn't happen because something happened at exactly that point; it happens because an accumulation of things reaches a tipping point.
For instance, with my workplace there were (unseen) negotiations with the union on how to respond. For at least a week or more, us peons were saying (or I was to myself) what the hell is the governor doing? Well, in all fairness, lots of people were doing things behind the scenes.
I'm saying "celebrities are getting hit now" pushed a lot of folks past that tipping point.
If a random person wins the lottery, no one blinks an eye. If Tom Hanks and the NBA win the lottery, people start wondering if a) it's more common than they thought to win the lottery or b) the lottery is rigged, because statistically celebs should have a low chance of winning it.
If that is somehow supposed prove the WHO mishandled the pandemic, then the administration who is withdrawing from the WHO has been absolutely criminal in their handling of this disease.
February 28: "When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
— Trump, at a coronavirus task force press briefing
March 5: “Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled.”
— Trump tweet.
March 6: "Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.”
— Trump, while visiting CDC headquarters in Atlanta. This was false. In fact, at this time testing capacity was about 75,000 nationally, according to the CDC.
March 10: "This was unexpected. … And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
— Trump, to reporters at the U.S. Capitol
1 January 2020 – After Wuhan Municipal Health Commission report of a cluster of cases of pneumonia (31 Dec. 2019) WHO sets up Incident Management Support Team (...) putting the organization on an emergency footing for dealing with the outbreak
5 January 2020 – WHO publishes first Disease Outbreak News on the new virus
10 January 2020 – WHO publishes guidelines with advice to all countries on how to detect, test and manage potential cases, based on what was known at the time
12 January 2020 – China publishes genetic sequence of COVID-19
13 January 2020 – Thailand confirms cases
14 January 2020 – WHO warns of limited human-to-human transmission
20-21 January 2020 – WHO field visit to Wuhan
22 January 2020 – WHO mission in Wuhan issues statement on evidence of human-to-human transmission
22-23 January 2020 – WHO boards assess whether the outbreak constituted a public health emergency of international concern, no consensus is reached, the Emergency Committee (EC) eventually settles to reconvene within 10 days after receiving more information
30 January 2020 – The EC reconvenes and consensus is reached, advises the Director-General that the outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The Director-General accepted the recommendation and declared the novel coronavirus outbreak (2019-nCoV) a PHEIC.
3 February 2020 – WHO releases the international community's Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan
11-12 February 2020 – WHO convened a Research and Innovation Forum on COVID-19
16-24 February 2020 – WHO-China Joint mission on fact finding trip to China, eventually publishes a report on the findings.
11 March 2020 – WHO characterises COVID-19 as a pandemic.
––––––
Of note may be here the last 10 days of January: No scientific consensus was reached regarding a PHEIC on 22-23 January, but was eventually declared on 30 Jan. as more data became available. (The first assessment was just a week after human-to-human transmission was confirmed.) A first response plan was published only 3 days thereafter. However, to declare a pandemic, this required still additional data, international conferences requiring some lead time for planning and scheduling, time consuming fact finding missions, reports…
which means that no, we haven't fully withdrawn from the WHO.
With luck and given the last 6+ months of polls, we have just added "unfuck this, too" to the to-do list of the first two years of a new adminstration's agenda.
79 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 76.2 ms ] threadIf that isn't clear evidence that they are beyond useless, then I don't know what is.
Alas, sometimes large bureaucracies take a while to catch up with common sense. (See also, fax machines).
There actually is solid, undeniable evidence now, which is great! Let's see how they apply that in the future.
Someone didn't listen to common sense and the available Intelligence also.
Trump did not call COVID19 a hoax. He called what Democrats said about his administration's response to the pandemic a "hoax", akin to the "impeachment hoax" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/29/joe-biden-trum...).
https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...
[paywalled - but going via a google search gets round it]
'Wuhan virus probably is spreading between people (2020-01-04)
Wuhan officials also said on Friday that no evidence of human to human transmission has been found so far.
But Ho said it is possible that the virus can be passed from person to person, and this is likely to have already happened in the Wuhan outbreak.'
https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1500994-20200104.h...
'Wuhan pneumonia: what we know about the new virus and how you can stop yourself getting sick (2020-1-9)
Dr Ho Pak-leung, from the University of Hong Kong, said the new coronavirus was believed to be spread through droplets.
"The public should wear disposable surgical masks in crowded places," Ho said. "They should also clean their hands frequently."
https://today.line.me/hk/article/Wuhan+pneumonia+what+we+kno...
'Q&A with HK microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung who helped confirm coronavirus' human spread
Tell us what you saw in Wuhan (on 17th Jan).
Let me tell you what I think is the truth. All the places we visited in Wuhan looked like they were putting on a show. Whatever we asked them, they answered as if they had prepared hard with well-thought-out replies. However, Zhong Nanshan was extremely sharp - he kept asking follow-up questions, like: "Is there anything else?" "Are there any more cases?" "Is it really like you're saying, just that many cases?"
Eventually, under pressure, they relented and told us it seemed that there was one patient in the neurosurgery department who had infected 14 medical workers. But they also said those medical staff had not had their diagnoses confirmed.
...
We met a deputy-level national leader and officials from the National Health Commission. They were all quite frank. Our expert group reported that the situation was severe, and there must have been cases of human transmission, and that preventive measures needed to be taken immediately.'
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/exclusive-qa-wit...
> https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...
The Guardian disagrees: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/18/caught-in-a-su...
> “Why did the WHO Ignore an email from Taiwanese health officials in late December alerting them to the possibility that coronvirus could be transmitted between humans?” the president asked in a tweet on Friday, echoing a claim made by Taipei.
> However, the Taiwanese email appears to have made no such warning. It was sent from Taiwan’s CDC to its WHO liaison officer on 31 December, hours after the first official report of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan were published online.
> According to the text provided to the Guardian, the email said: “News resources today indicate that at least seven, atypical pneumonia cases were reported in China.”
> It restates the details of Chinese report, adding “I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us.”
> The email did not contain new information, and certainly nothing about human-to-human transmission. The WHO had picked up the same report on the night of 30 December and was urgently seeking more information. On 1 January it activated its incident management support team, putting the organisation on an emergency footing.
I feel like this whole "it said/it said" thing with all these various organizations and their shifting messages is going to take years, at least, to disentangle.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3904054
https://news.yahoo.com/taiwan-accuses-failing-heed-warning-1...
'The officials said doctors in Taiwan had learned from their colleagues in mainland China that medical staff were falling ill from the as-yet unnamed coronavirus, a sign of human-to-human transmission that Taiwan says it passed on to the WHO and Chinese authorities on December 31. However, the WHO did not communicate the information with other nations.'
So I guess it comes down to semantics; whether a mention of atypical cases and request for confirmation is effectively a warning - or not.
Whatever the interpretation, it seems like the lack of response from the WHO to that email indicates the WHO were in the dark at the time, or not willing to share what they had. If the former then the email could be said to have formed a warning of some kind.
>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/18/caught-in-a-su...
I love how The Guardian tries to twist the facts in the service of an anti Trump screed. Personally I feel the report from Reuters was far more balanced (it doesn't even mention Trump)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan...
(curious about the downvotes btw...)
“News sources today indicate that at least seven cases of atypical pneumonia were reported in Wuhan, China. Her health authorities responded to the media that they did not believe the cases were SARS; however, the examples are still under study and the cases were isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much for your attention in this matter. ”
But on January 30th, WHO said there was human to human transmission, and it was dangerous, officially declared a public health emergency.
At what point would you say CDC started taking it seriously?
> At what point would you say CDC started taking it seriously?
I’ll let you know.
The alarm was not being widely sounded by anyone but the WHO before then either. (Actual nation states DO have intelligence agencies who could have been analyzing this threat, btw).
However, on January 30th when they did sound the alarm -- countries that paid attention to this and took the threat seriously then are, still, doing much better than countries that waited months to take it seriously, or which still aren't taking it seriously. This shows that the WHO in fact did something useful.
The U.S. pulling out of the WHO is meant to distract from the fact that U.S. didn't take it seriously even when the WHO did sound the alarm, somehow blaming the WHO for the U.S. ignoring the WHO. Eliminating the WHO and having no world health organization at all wouldn't fix this problem, and would harm rather than help the global capacity for pandemic response. Perhaps they should have sent out an alarm earlier and not doing so was some kind of incomptency (I'm not convinced, but perhaps), but they still in fact played an important role and did send out the alarm far far before the U.S. paid any attention to it; sending out the alarm earlier wouldn't have made much difference for the US, we would have just had more time to ignore it.
I mean, I guess if the U.S. took the money they were giving to the WHO and instead spent it on re-funding the infectious disease monitoring and research in China that we used to fund but stopped at least that would sound like trying to improve monitoring efficacy (whether it's a wise way to do it or not), instead of just bullshit. But we all know that's the opposite of what is happening, in fact, they recently cancelled MORE US-funded research on infectious diseases in China.
If President Obama had made a statement saying, “Today we are taking the grave but necessary step of withdrawing from the WHO due to their not being an effective advocate for their mandate.” would you have the same instant reaction?
As a centrist myself, the country seems so hyper partisan with neither side willing to give a millimeter. Sometimes though it’s right to disband an organization if it isn’t doing the job it is meant to. I don’t know whether the WHO was or wasn’t but maybe this action isn’t anymore “so so stupid” than disbanding the League of Nations at the end of World War II. I don’t see any reasons for this being stupid in your post other than ad hominem attacks and namecalling against the actor.
What if: the fact that he wouldn’t have (and didn’t) do that is part of the reason he is so popular?
Otherwise, what you’re saying is: “sure, maybe what he did was bad, but if someone else had done a bad thing, they would be bad, too!” Which, okay, but they didn’t, and imagining someone else doing something bad doesn’t excuse people actually doing bad things.
> Sometimes though it’s right to disband an organization if it isn’t doing the job it is meant to. I don’t know whether the WHO was or wasn’t but maybe this action isn’t anymore “so so stupid” than disbanding the League of Nations at the end of World War II.
Well, part of the problem is that, no matter how much you interpret the WHO to have bungled up things (maybe a lot!), our federal government has still bungled it up far worse. So a lot of the reaction is that, we’re replacing the WHO with a disaster.
Instead, the United States is doing China the favor of pulling out so China doesn't have to. This gives China more control over the WHO. Ultimately, as the US abandons its position of global leadership it allows China to take on the mantle. This is a boon to the Chinese communist party.
If Obama had pulled out of the WHO during an epidemic I would think this is a supremely irresponsible decision. Though I will admit that if it were Obama making this decision I might suspect there could be factors that aren't known to the general public, rather than just narcissistic boneheaded idiocy.
Jan. 14: WHO announces Chinese authorities have seen "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus."
https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...
Taiwan says WHO failed to act on coronavirus transmission warning
https://twitter.com/nomiackerman/status/1246728816103481344?...
@WHO has admitted it did not even REPLY to Taiwan officials raising concerns in late DECEMBER over possible human to human transmission in the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. For fear of hurting WHO relationship with China. Answers needed.
https://twitter.com/sehof/status/1239418439799734273?s=19
Taiwan’s Vice President, the epidemiologist Chen Chien-jen, accuses the @WHO of ignoring Taiwan’s warning on 31 December of the possibility of human-to-human transmission.
https://twitter.com/adamscrabble/status/1252319621937598464?...
WHO collusion with China was been disastrous.
https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/20...
The US pays the most, in absolute terms, double than China.
What other mechanism do you propose to correct this?
That makes me think that the whole organization has been bought out and sold off. But, that's just my knee-jerk reaction and a gut feeling.
That said, what's there to pay to be a member? Why not just stay in there like everyone else?
I don't know how much it costs, but there's also the signaling part of being in it (we are implicitly signaling support by being part of the group). That being said, leaving in the middle of the pandemic seems like an odd choice.
What is the return of investment (funds?) for being a member of this organization? I presume they're doing more than just handling Coronavirus.
So, I found the official data [1].
I̵n̵ ̵2̵0̵1̵9̵ ̵-̵ ̵U̵S̵ ̵p̵a̵i̵d̵ ̵$̵6̵7̵M̵ ̵o̵u̵t̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵t̵o̵t̵a̵l̵ ̵$̵1̵0̵1̵M̵ ̵(̵6̵6̵%̵)̵ ̵i̵n̵ ̵f̵u̵n̵d̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵i̵f̵ ̵I̵ ̵a̵m̵ ̵r̵e̵a̵d̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵t̵h̵i̵s̵ ̵r̵i̵g̵h̵t̵ ̵[̵2̵]̵.̵
̵ ̵I̵n̵ ̵2̵0̵2̵0̵ ̵-̵ ̵U̵S̵ ̵p̵a̵i̵d̵ ̵$̵9̵9̵M̵ ̵o̵u̵t̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵t̵o̵t̵a̵l̵ ̵$̵1̵8̵2̵M̵ ̵(̵5̵4̵%̵)̵ ̵i̵n̵ ̵t̵o̵t̵a̵l̵ ̵c̵o̵n̵t̵r̵i̵b̵u̵t̵i̵o̵n̵s̵.̵ ̵[̵3̵]̵
Correct source, US (gov) contributes about 16 % of the total budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization#Fina...
What does the US get in return? There is also soft power and other influence that US expects to gain from it besides the raw ROI. The initial assessment is impossible unless we understand the benefit of the membership.
[1] https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/as...
[2] https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/AC...
[3] https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/20...
"The WHO has played a leading role in several public health achievements, most notably the eradication of smallpox, the near-eradication of polio, and the development of an Ebola vaccine."
A tiny drop in the bucket of the US budget to keep polio from resurging in the developing world sounds like a decent investment.
(Those numbers don't appear to be correct, either; the US contributes about 16%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization#Fina...)
Definitely.
Can you double check the source I linked? I did and it contradicts with the wikipedia which is weird.
Eradication of smallpox was indeed an achievement, however, it was also many decades ago. The modern WHO is different people.
In more recent times, there is a history of problematic behaviour, like changing their own definition of pandemic specifically so they could declare one for a trivial disease (Swine Flu) and then lying about having done so, although archive.org remembers all:
https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/05/world-health-organization-...
And the WHO helps get it where it's needed.
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/18-10-2019-major-milest...
> A randomized trial for the vaccine began during the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2015. When no other organization was positioned to run a trial in Guinea during the complex emergency, the government of Guinea and WHO took the unusual step to lead the trial.
> A global coalition of funders and researchers provided the critical support required. Funders included the Canadian Government (through the Public Health Agency of Canada, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, International Development Research Centre, Global Affairs Canada); the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (through the Research Council of Norway's GLOBVAC programme); the Wellcome Trust; the UK government through the Department for International Development; and Médecins Sans Frontières.
> In the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 236,000 people have been vaccinated with rVSV ZEBOV GP donated by Merck to WHO, including more than 60,000 health and frontline workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi.
As for the Forbes blog, the author doesn't have a great record on public health: https://nypost.com/2020/03/08/coronavirus-going-to-hit-its-p...
Besides, the article you link says a lot of things that are true. Death rates vary according to age, China peaked and declined first, CV affects high risk groups the most (kinda tautological but not really discussed much in early March when it was written), etc. I'm not sure what's so objectionable about it.
All - please help verify the source I linked above if you can. Take it with a grain of salt for now.
For 2, where I think you pulled the $67/101 million, appears to be the outstanding balance of assessment including what was unpaid over previous periods. Not familiar with the data but that doesn't sound like the required contributions in a year, it just sounds like the US has the biggest unpaid assessed bill.
For 3, I don't see where you obtained those numbers either. The "gross assessment" which I assume is the contribution based on wealth/population is $236 million for the US vs $1076 million total assessed.
Again not familiar with the data, I could be wrong. That's how I am reading those documents though.
The U.S. was paying about $400-500 million / year, not an insignificant amount of tax dollars to go to an organization that chose to help China at the U.S.' expense by lying and covering up necessary information.
The great thing about local responses is that many different things can be tried, and different cultures with different viewpoints can be respected. When one organisation 'coordinates' the whole world, everyone can be wrong in unison. There's a lot of evidence that this has been happening with the WHO, but it's not just them.
Some of the most valuable evidence generated in COVID times is from comparing different countries to observe differences based on what they did (or lack of differences).
The WHO is an example of what one world government would look like: not a beatific utopia ruled by neutral and dispassionate experts, but incompetence and disarray unchecked by any sort of accountability. Remember: the WHO isn't run by a doctor but rather a former Ethiopian minister of finance. It has routinely made announcements that not only contradicted other health agencies and researchers but contradicted itself, as of a few weeks earlier.
For example, the WHO's report on non-pharmaceutical interventions prepared in pre-COVID times says:
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...
"Pandemic: Not recommended under any circumstances: contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry/exit screening, border closure"
For a mere epidemic they also don't recommend internal travel restrictions of any sort.
In other words, the WHO recommends against lockdowns. When faced with a virus that spreads in exactly the same way, and which it soon became clear was of similar severity, they haven't gone back and changed their beliefs nor prior advice though.
The WHO has no ability to enforce any standards of practice, and I am not saying it ought to. Sure, if they are recommending against something, there's nothing stopping a local jurisdiction from doing it anyway, if they think their conditions or capacities differ, or they have access to better scientific guidance. They may be making a terrible mistake, or not, so it goes. This is how it is, and it ought not to be any different.
But if you give up on coordination and cross-border mutual aid, and just say that it's every country/state/city/household for themselves to do what they personally decide best inconsistently with all their neighbors... well, how is that working out for the USA right now?
Should we also eliminate the CDC, and let each state do for themselves? And eliminate state depts of health, and let each city do for themselves? I mean, heck eliminate city depts of health too, just let each household do for themselves. Now different "cultures and viewpoints can be respected", right? That DOES seem to be the USA approach at times; it's not working out very well, because of some un-changeable facts about how infectious diseases work.
The OP is blaming the WHO for not supplying the right information in early January. Putting aside an argument about how (un)reasonable a mistake this was to make under the circumstances, if you're complaining that they didn't warn the world when they should have, how is it possibly an improvement to leave every country on their own to figure out the threat level from any part of the globe without coordination? How could that ever work better? If someone is complaining that the WHO didn't warn the world as early as they should, eliminating them so they dont' even exist to fill that role would obviously not produce a different outcome.
What you see across the world is that the population's behaviour is generally ahead of whatever rules or recommendations governments are coming up with. People figure out the risks to themselves and others faster than governments do because the latter are incentivised (or believe they are incentivised) to take a safety über alles approach, and are very easily pushed around by "experts" and journalists, in ways that smaller groups aren't.
Eliminating the CDC - I don't think the CDC has been particularly useful in this event either. Frankly as far as I am concerned governments have made what is now obviously a perfectly normal and trivial virus drastically worse, to the extent that we'd be far better off as a world, and far healthier as a population, if governments had literally done nothing at all. But doing nothing is paradoxically the hardest thing for any government to do. The best way to bring about that outcome is thus to just clear out organisations and government agencies that would otherwise following a road of, "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done", which seems to explain a good 90% of the lockdown absurdities I see on a daily basis.
If you want to consider that a successful outcome, I guess that is your perogative.
I am not about arguing it has to be a "rule" enforced by the police rather than a "recommendation". I don't think enforced by the police with penalties is what makes the difference between succesful control or not, that's not what I'm arguing for.
But arguing that not only no international coordination is required but no coordination of any kind, just people acting as their own personal epidimiologists based on what they read on social media... well, let's check back in a couple years and see how we think it's working out.
Firstly, it's not actually true that Sweden had far more deaths than its "neighbours". This is a bizarre form of cherry picking. Look across Europe and Sweden looks unremarkable: there are plenty of nearby countries that went full lockdown and saw far worse results. For this "neighbours" talking point to mean anything would require that physical proximity to Sweden meant something important, but it doesn't.
Secondly, "deaths from COVID" data is all horribly corrupted. It's actually "deaths with COVID" that gets reported, but that isn't obvious because it keeps being mis-labelled. We have no idea how many people have died from COVID. Only total excess deaths seems reliable because it doesn't have a definition that can be tampered with.
Thirdly, the idea that lockdowns are about reducing total deaths with or from COVID is not correct. That was retroactively invented when it became clear what a disastrous policy it is. Nobody claimed they could do that except by ensuring everyone gets healthcare, which is why they were justified on the grounds of preventing hospital overflow and nothing else. If everyone gets access to healthcare then the grounds for intervention evaporate. In Sweden everyone got healthcare, their hospitals were never even stressed. By lockdown's own logic, this proves Sweden's approach was correct. Hence the furious attempts to rewrite history by claiming lockdowns can save lives even when hospitals are quiet.
Sweden is seeing some economic disruption, partly caused by neighbours who cannot accept that they wrecked their own citizen's economy and civil liberties for nothing. Norway has publicly admitted lockdown was a mistake, for example, but has restricted travel from Sweden anyway. And of course the rest of the world committing economic hari-kari simultaneously will inevitably effect Sweden: it doesn't change the correctness of their response.
But arguing that not only no international coordination is required but no coordination of any kind, just people acting as their own personal epidimiologists based on what they read on social media... well, let's check back in a couple years and see how we think it's working out.
We don't need to wait two years. The armchair epidemiologists who argued against lockdown already won completely. There is no remaining argument, no debate to be had. Lockdowns were meant to avoid overflowing hospitals, places that didn't do them didn't see overflowing hospitals. End of story. Why: because every model generated by so-called experts was wrong. Every prediction was false. People were flagging this as a likely outcome immediately once the models were published. The countries that said actually this is trivial and we should do basically nothing, like Sweden and Belarus, have seen average outcomes even by the highly dubious standards of PCR testing. This suggests lockdowns have no effect at all (and which in turn suggests the testing might mostly be measuring noise).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52088167
If he answers in the affirmative, he pisses off China, and will likely see them retaliate by withdrawing from cooperation at a time when that could have severe impacts on the world's ability to deal with a pandemic.
If he answers in the negative, he pisses off Taiwan, a lot of people, and a lot of countries who are also not willing to stand up to China on this issue.
And what's the benefit for asking this of an epidemiologist. He's not there to give personal political opinions, he's there to be an expert on a specific subject.
As for the rest of the issues - I know you're not specifically saying it, but there's a lot of folks that blame the WHO for not warning people about this, or delaying announcements.
The WHO were quite early in warning that countries should be prepared for this, that there should be greater efforts put in attempting to limit it's spread.
There is some truth that they didn't declare it a pandemic as early as everyone wanted, they had to wait for it to meet official definitions of being a pandemic.
The WHO declaring a pandemic, however, didn't mean countries couldn't act earlier to stop it.
It requires governments to sort this shit out, not an organisation who is focussed on health.
And they are not currently part of China. (Or, at least, they are not currently governed by the government of the rest of China.) Again, deal with it.
Different governments had different responses, which had different effects. Under the circumstances, to say "we already covered China" is pretty close to dereliction of duty.
Yes, I know China is going to have a hissy fit if anyone admits that Taiwan exists as a separate entity. China needs to stop acting like a five-year-old. I would say that WHO needs to tell China where to get off, except that (in this situation) WHO really needed China's cooperation. That makes this a much more difficult question to answer.
But, in fact, it is China that makes this a political question. The question itself is not inherently political.
As for whether they're part of China - that's also a political thing. If you don't believe that, then ask why the US doesn't formally recognise Taiwan as an independent country. Oh, right, because the US Government decided that it was better to keep having access to Chinese markets. The US isn't unique here, most countries don't formally recognise Taiwan either, because it's beneficial for them not to.
But:
> As for whether they're part of China - that's also a political thing.
Yes and no. No, they are not currently part of China. You have two separate governments, neither of which is subordinate to the other. Therefore neither one is part of the other. That's the de facto reality. It's not ambiguous, it's not subjective, and it's not open to interpretation.
But yes, it's political in that both sides claim a de jure unity - they just disagree about who's in charge of it. And it's political for everybody else, because they can't side with Taiwan without upsetting China, and they aren't willing to upset China.
But for China to try to pretend that the de facto situation is other than what it is... hey, we aren't blind, China. We know what the reality of the current situation is, no matter how much they try to pretend that it's something else.
https://www.who.int/hongkongchina/about-us
"I'm sorry, but this is a political question which I'm not able to answer.".
or
"You know this question puts me in a difficult position and it is not up to me."
To me it seems his mind is made up. He does what China wants. He doesn't try to appear neutral. To him Taiwan is China.
But either way - it shows how great power China has over international bodies and it is scary.
Besides questions of WHO competency, we have to ask ourselves whether WHO even has good intentions in the first place.
It's not too dissimilar to taunting someone hoping they'll do something you can latch onto.
The lack of reaction / dodging was clearly enough to drive up a shitstorm. Any attempt to acknowledge and answer the question, even in deflecting it, was going to cause more trouble.
> it shows how great power China has over international bodies and it is scary.
It shows how much power China has in general.
Look at Hong Kong. Most countries are doing nothing except making vague statements for peace, at most some are offering refuge for some who want to escape.
This is certainly not true. WHO lawyer gave later lengthy explanation of WHO position on Taiwan on a press conference and nobody cared. It wasn't the issue of Taiwan that shocked people. Everyone following news knows that UN is politically paralyzed institution.
What was shocking, to me and people I know, was the extend of fear and disingenuity of a member of WHO. He has clearly western roots and we expect from him western political culture. He is the man in authority position who we are supposed to trust. But this behavior was all but trustworthy. He was deceiving. He was laying and he was voluntarily following Chinese party line.
The reporter was not stupid, indeed. It's her job to ask difficult questions.
I applaud her for opening my eyes to the fact that I should trust WHO only about us much as I trust China.
> Look at Hong Kong. Most countries are doing nothing except making vague statements for peace, at most some are offering refuge for some who want to escape.
Again, this is something that I tend to expect. Western states have nothing to gain there and we have no obligations to these 7.5 million people.
> It shows how much power China has in general.
I guess maybe I was naive, but my a prior would be that USA would have a lot more power. The fact that western people are bowing before China in this way is new to me.
And then, pausing SOLIDARITY on the HCQ arm because of the flawed Lancet study (granted, they weren't the only ones to fall for it).
That said, Maybe someone can explain why the USA just can't continue to refuse to pay their dues until there is substantial leadership change? My sense here is that this isn't related to an actual desire for better health organizations and more a mechanism for USA leadership to deflect from their own failings.
My guess is the whinging would be operatic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization#Oper...
If your complaint is the crisis being made worse by confusion, misinformation and incompetence, I hardly see how removing resources and trying to favor hamstrung American institutions is an improvement.
Maybe take an inventory of where you were and what you were doing and thinking that week?
The sudden switch was fascinating to me. One theory is Tom Hanks getting it coupled with the NBA shutting down on the 11th turned it from abstract to very concrete for a lot of folks:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-12/tom-hanks...
For instance, with my workplace there were (unseen) negotiations with the union on how to respond. For at least a week or more, us peons were saying (or I was to myself) what the hell is the governor doing? Well, in all fairness, lots of people were doing things behind the scenes.
If a random person wins the lottery, no one blinks an eye. If Tom Hanks and the NBA win the lottery, people start wondering if a) it's more common than they thought to win the lottery or b) the lottery is rigged, because statistically celebs should have a low chance of winning it.
February 28: "When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” — Trump, at a coronavirus task force press briefing
March 5: “Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled.” — Trump tweet.
March 6: "Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.” — Trump, while visiting CDC headquarters in Atlanta. This was false. In fact, at this time testing capacity was about 75,000 nationally, according to the CDC.
March 10: "This was unexpected. … And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” — Trump, to reporters at the U.S. Capitol
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/21/837348551/timeline-what-trump...
Here's a shortened version:
1 January 2020 – After Wuhan Municipal Health Commission report of a cluster of cases of pneumonia (31 Dec. 2019) WHO sets up Incident Management Support Team (...) putting the organization on an emergency footing for dealing with the outbreak
5 January 2020 – WHO publishes first Disease Outbreak News on the new virus
10 January 2020 – WHO publishes guidelines with advice to all countries on how to detect, test and manage potential cases, based on what was known at the time
12 January 2020 – China publishes genetic sequence of COVID-19
13 January 2020 – Thailand confirms cases
14 January 2020 – WHO warns of limited human-to-human transmission
20-21 January 2020 – WHO field visit to Wuhan
22 January 2020 – WHO mission in Wuhan issues statement on evidence of human-to-human transmission
22-23 January 2020 – WHO boards assess whether the outbreak constituted a public health emergency of international concern, no consensus is reached, the Emergency Committee (EC) eventually settles to reconvene within 10 days after receiving more information
30 January 2020 – The EC reconvenes and consensus is reached, advises the Director-General that the outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The Director-General accepted the recommendation and declared the novel coronavirus outbreak (2019-nCoV) a PHEIC.
3 February 2020 – WHO releases the international community's Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan
11-12 February 2020 – WHO convened a Research and Innovation Forum on COVID-19
16-24 February 2020 – WHO-China Joint mission on fact finding trip to China, eventually publishes a report on the findings.
11 March 2020 – WHO characterises COVID-19 as a pandemic.
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Of note may be here the last 10 days of January: No scientific consensus was reached regarding a PHEIC on 22-23 January, but was eventually declared on 30 Jan. as more data became available. (The first assessment was just a week after human-to-human transmission was confirmed.) A first response plan was published only 3 days thereafter. However, to declare a pandemic, this required still additional data, international conferences requiring some lead time for planning and scheduling, time consuming fact finding missions, reports…
which means that no, we haven't fully withdrawn from the WHO.
With luck and given the last 6+ months of polls, we have just added "unfuck this, too" to the to-do list of the first two years of a new adminstration's agenda.