And again I'll tell you that science works by updating information, and that what they said was almost certainly true at the time since there were only a small number of identified infections and the vieus had only been identified for about a month.

Doctor Li Wenliang and a group of fellow physicians from Wuhan rang the alarm bells in late December. Chinese authorities tried to silence him, imposed a gag order on the nation's state-controlled media and ordered laboratories to destroy samples. If not for their attempts at sweeping the whole problem under the rug, the world would have known about the virus' ability for airborne human-to-human transmission by Jan 14, when this tweet was sent out. One week later, on Jan 20, Chinese authorities finally confirmed h2h transmissibility. It was during those crucial days (Dec 30-Jan 20) that thousands of international travellers spread the virus across the world from its primary cluster in Wuhan. Had the Chinese been more transparent and quick to inform the public and the rest of the world of the potential danger, it might have been possible to contain the virus inside Hubei province and eliminate it in the rest of the world.

Furthermore, note that the WHO, in this tweet, is uncritically regurgitating Chinese propaganda. We dont know if the statement from this tweet represents the genuine state of knowledge of the Chinese government at the time, or if it was deliberate misinformation to save face and hide that they had lost control. Your postulating as fact an interpretation whose accurateness we cannot actually know.

Yet it's refreshing to hear the plain reality, because the White House has been bullshitting the American people on this issue since the beginning.

Eh

Nobody here will know with certainty. However given the November whistle blowing attempts by physicians that were absolutely shut down I think we can infer some data

It is fairly clear the Chinese government cannot be trusted. Has Jack Ma surfaced yet? Have they admitted any wrong in their active genocide campaigns?

Given how harshly this was dealt with December and January, those videos of people locked in homes, I think we can pick a side on this. I know I can

Man I love how you type out a paragraph to correct me for "postuling as fact an interpretation whose accurateness we cannot actually know" but don't do the same for the myriad of posters inferring fraud at the WHO, including the person I directly quoted. Yep, you're just seeking objectivity and facts here. Definitely not a thinly veiled partisan attack.

I doubt the world would have known earlier. I doubt the Chinese government knew much earlier than the 20th. They were taking the situation pretty seriously and already isolating cases. Even if they weren't transparent, and to be clear they definitely weren't, I don't see an avenue where coronavirus doesn't spread out. We're not talking about something with obvious symptoms during infectivity like SARS. It wasn't established that asymptomatic spread was a thing until much later, after all.



We definitely can't know with certainty what the mental state of the WHO officials were at the time.

China locking down people in their homes though doesn't necessarily mean they were doing it because they knew it was transmissible. Precautions are often taken before you know for a fact if they are needed, and yes China definitely silenced whistleblowers.

However none of that translates to the WHO knowingly tweeting lies about the transmissibility of a novel virus. There were I think less than 1000 cases at the time. However, I definitely think they knew h2h transmissibility was a possibility and were taking steps to contain it.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 18 2021 08:34am

Ya this is my point . I think China and WHO both knew this prior to publicly release

The bolded part is my key point: yes, the WHO didnt knowingly tweet lies, but they were all too willing to suspend any sense of disbelief or caution when handling info from a government which had given them, and the world, every reason to treat their infos with a huge grain of salt. It's really not a stretch to think that growing Chinese influence on the WHO factored into this decision to treat and spread their message so uncritically. Remember that the current WHO president Tedros only got into his current position, against unified opposition of Western countries who wanted someone else, because a China-led alliance of developing and emerging countries rallied behind him.

You are probably right on one point though: informing the rest of the world of the possibility of h2h transmission in mid-January would most likely have been too late to contain the virus inside China/Hubei.

The WHO is either so incompetent as to uncritically fall for Chinese propaganda, or they were complicit. In either case, the right thing to do is to demand the resignations of key officials and never allow those individuals to hold positions of influence again. You screw up badly, you take accountability, and the WHO screwed up badly.

im curious as to what the WHO should do, if in the future they're notified by china that a new infectious disease has sprung up, and the numbers given seem underwhelming. do they just assume its worse than it is? do they just multiple all info given by China by some X#?

like, i agree china blows, and that they lie, and that the WHO has been partially compromised by their interests. but what do they do moving forward as far as dealing with numbers and suggesting things?

I think the first step is to treat China akin to what they are, and not what our more optimistic pacifists hope they can be.

There was a lot of criticism at the time alleging that China was misrepresenting the situation. It is not like the only information we had was coming from Chinese officials, but the WHO made the decision to promote Chinese disinformation. We can't pretend that all is good.