Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne
nature.com
nature.com
It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepening political divisions and driving us to the brink.
And yet political leaders will face no consequences.
From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics, even when the US had Trump as president, someone who contributed actively to misinformation regarding the virus.
Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire.
We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin".
Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for everyone to see. But the UK government was in constant and total denial until the hospitals started clogging up.
And even when the UK government finally admitted it, their handling was truly, truly dire. Constant failure to act, constant acting too late, constant u-turns, throwing 40-billion down the pan on dodgy contracts.
You remember wrongly. He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it.
I think Boris has done very badly in his handling of the pandemic; given how many bad decisions he made, it's strange that people seem fixated on this thing he didn't say.
Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.
By the time Boris started appearing on TV, COVID was already on the UK doorstep having marched through China, Asia and Europe.
By that time, even a five year old kid could have told you that "taking it on the chin" was not up for discussion.
All people who are ______ are ______. Another opinion. Opinions can be intentionally or unintentionally deceiving, which makes them lies.
Like I explain in my nearby comment, two of the most decorated UK epidemiologists, being also current and former UK chief scientific advisers, recommended that strategy. Boris did listen to science, it just turns out that some of the UK's very top level scientists were really bad, worse than the 5 year old kid your talked about.
I think it's always worth examining your assumptions. Every time you consider a policy of government, you should consider what would happen if you didn't do it, even if only to compare against a baseline.
> By that time, even a five year old kid could have told you that "taking it on the chin" was not up for discussion.
It was not so obvious at the time. It seemed like a very bad idea to me, but lots of people, including on this forum, were vehement that it was the only option.
Not really. Two years ago, when COVID started to spread outside China, the initial concern was the potential impact it would have on saturating national health services and there was no concern regarding it's death rate, which led to the "flatten the curve" political talking point.
Keep in mind that "flatten the curve" implies that everyone is expected to contract the disease sooner or later, but only in a way that doesn't overwhelm health services. Back then it was presumed that contracting COVID was not a cause for concern, and that after the first infection then everyone was finally immune and everything was back to normal.
Only after COVID was experienced first hand outside of china, and thus without being subjected to the CCP's censors, did the world learned about it's true fatality rate, transmission rate, reinfection rate, and lingering health problems. Afterwards there were subsequent variants which again became pandemics.
When the real impact of COVID started to become noticeable, the approach to the disease changed radically to one based on containment at all cost followed by mass vaccination campaigns once the first effective vaccines started to become available.
He back visiting a hospital, howwever this time as a patient in the ICU within a month.
In defense of Boris, UK scientific advisors Patrick Vallance and Roy M. Anderson advised to go for the "herd immunity" strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pand...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Then when the 16.3.2020 Imperial College report came out, Boris did announce he is changing the strategy.
Moreover, a year later his government had the gall to pretend that herd immunity through infection had never been the strategy. It's a post-truth government.
He did more than skip them, he remained thousands of miles away on holiday on a Caribbean island. Didn't deem it important enough to return early.
You also forgot the Lockdown parties. ;-)
Even before the party revelations, his and his government's handling of the pandemic was already well understood to be dire (dither & delay, too little too late, billions on dodgy contracts).
Post-party revelations ? Whatever scraps of credibility that may have remained quickly took a long walk off a short pier.
He and his supporters try to cling to his credibility on the back of the vaccines. But even that was dire. The completely un-necessary and embarrassing EU fighting and unfounded British exceptionalism over the vaccines, the false claims about AZ being a British invention when it is well documented that (something like) 75% of the AZ vaccine team are EU and Other nationals ... the list goes on.
Strange how the idea the UK mishandled the crisis persists, but at least one report [1] suggests otherwise, maybe the UK could have done better but certainly didn't do much worse than it's peers:
United Kingdom excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 128 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 0.97) <- actually over reported deaths
France excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 124 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.28)
Spain excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 186 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.64)
Italy excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 227 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.89)
Poland excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 297 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 2.20)
1. https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821... (PDF)
> have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics
Have they? It's a horrible back and forth, not based on any evidence. New rules are announced and rescinded a week later (e.g. Germany not ending quarantine of infected after all this week). During lockdowns, people were allowed to work in the same offices if required, but meeting anyone from outside your household was forbidden. Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach. I personally experienced police harassment for leaving the house. Green pass validity is still jumping back and forth (Austria). Let's not even get started on the endless amounts of lies, inaccuracies and moving goal posts surrounding the disappointing covid vaccines, the blacked out contracts to buy BILLIONS of them and the rejection of natural immunity after infection. Our governments have absolutely failed us and lost the last ounces of our trust they had.
I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy.
The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandatory. That has sent my trust from low into negative territory.
The worst part is anybody who dared point this out was met with fierce vitriol, shaming and general hatred. We were all just expected to fall in line and those who asked questions got shunned by society.
In the first month or so it would have been possible for a good leader to chill things out. But eventually the thing grew legs of its own and nobody could put an end to it. Society would just have to wear itself out and one by one come to its senses. Two years later we are just now truly coming to our senses.
Unfortunately it will take quite some time for this event to be remembered for what it truly was: the first true mass hysteria of the internet age.
And if anything, governments have been too relaxed about the origin of the pandemic (which has now officially killed 6 million!), while panicking about other details.
You're grossly misrepresenting the facts. If you take an objective look at recent history, you'll realize that politicians have been trying to juggle public health guidelines with economic and political topics. The bulk of these arbitrary measures result from politicians caving in to issues completely unrelated to public health guidelines.
Take for example how some countries mysteriously relaxed COVID restrictions during major public holidays like Christmas and new year's eve celebrations to afterwards hastily reintroduce additional restrictions to contain the expected hike in infection rates.
> Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach.
No they really weren't. People were charged for endangering public health by purposely violating mandatory lockdowns and social distancing requirements. Trying to frame this as punishment for sitting at the beach is like complaining that drunk driving is punishing people for enjoying a drink now and then.
The most obvious one was on masks and their lack of protection, hammered week after week by the gov spokesperson, until there was enough masks to be distributed. Then masks started to be pushed by the gov, people were encouraged to make their own, and we all know the story from there.
There was no lack of information or evidence, and they paid a lot to keep a full stock of emergency masks up until two years before the pandemic stroke (and then fucked up by giving up on emergency preparation). It was just plain criminal lying to avoid being confronted.
https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...
This! This is the bulshit we got fed for almost 6 months. Paired with "people don't know how to properly fit N95 anyway", "you touch four face 20 times in an hour on average, you'd be touching your mask the same" etc.
All of it with that specific condecending tone of "you plebes are not as informed as we policy makers are, we know best".
This slowly turned around when heavy mask wearing countries were clearly doing leaps and bounds better, and they started backpedaling, explaining that there was not enough masks anyway. People also progressively stopped freaking out about having to cover their face (in France in particular it was a thorny subject due to past religious controversies) so they didn't need weird purist "if it's not perfect why bother ?" excuses anymore.
It literally takes less than 5min in Google to realize your criticism is utter bullshit, and even come across statements by Dr Monica Gandhi complaining that her comments were misrepresented and distorted to come across as authoritative anti-mask assertions.
Please be more responsible and stop contributing to spread blatant misinformation.
Again, google it up. You can't fake this one. You do not need to take my word for it. Just have a shred of honesty and stop cherry-picking stale and debunked myths.
Telling HN users to Google something is just sloppy and intellectually lazy.
Over time communication has been improved, governments have been quite transparent at communicating their decisions (relatively speaking).
I don’t think it’s fair to pain the past ~2years as “governments lying” because of a few mistakes in time of high uncertainty.
They had (have?) the same attitude regarding school and children, only about last year/year and half were lower grade school kids mandated to wear masks.
The two main contamination pools were work and school, and it was plain obvious to everyone that school had to be maintained for economic reasons, yet the edu minister never seemed to give up his “it’s all for the children” attitude while giving the finger to school staff requests.
French gov avoided the most critical mistakes, and reacted better than some other countries in a number ways, including changing its position over time and making radical decisions when shit hit the fan. But what a bunch of dicks they were! I can’t remember how many large scale demo they managed to trigger during a pandemic when most people were freaking out and somewhat trying to be safe.
Corona has given Western governments a taste of power and they’ve used that to silence critics and restrict civil liberties - often based on faulty data.
Yes we’ve seen a lot of fuck up, but given the insane circumstances things have been communicated and handled way better than I would have expected. Of course you will have a lot of contradictory or stupid decisions when you have to adapt that fast to a rapidly spreading, deadly virus that blocks your entire hospital system. The scale of the problem was insane.
Is that supposed to be a quote? It doesn't seem to be a quote from the article. Not creating a panic seems to be a sensible thing to do in most circumstances. You want people to react with appropriate concern to risks, but not behave irrationally.
We now have a sizable percentage of people who not only don’t care what the WHO has to say, but also want to outright cut funding to the organization. Great outcome. Panick avoided.
No, not really. Not all, at least.
I vividly recall from the start of the very first lockdown, when the only people expected to be outside were those attending pressing matters like restocking provisions on supermarket, the local police caught a middle age man who was avoiding the lockdown by strolling around repeatedly with the same days-old loaf of bread under his arm. He didn't even bothered to actually spend a few cents on his scheme, and reused the same loaf of bread every single day to go for a stroll.
And let's not get started on refusals to adhere to simple basic personal higiene measures such as washing hands and wear a face mask, let alone vaccination rates.
People might have the age of an adult, but too many people do not have the personal responsibility expected from adults.
The example you chose is funny because, in my view, it's utterly insane that we ever had lockdowns preventing people from "going for a stroll". That you think any reasonable person ("an adult," apparently) agrees with you just shows how far off the reservation you've wandered.
No, I'm the kind of person who is well aware that reaching adulthood is not a magic elixir that automatically grants everyone the ability to act responsibly or rationally, let alone a sense of common good.
Throwing adulthood around as if it implies everyone will do the right thing is blatantly unrealistic.
There was never any justification for banning people going for a walk. You've been seriously misled.
Among the various objections people made to this I pointed out that my wife is in the medical field, albeit not on the front lines--his recklessness is a risk to her. His opinion was that doctors knew what they were signing up for, it didn't matter. Unfortunately, the moderators zapped the thread before I got a reply to my pointing out that she had not signed up for dealing with reckless idiots in a pandemic.
Have you been living under a rock for the past two years?
There was a pandemic killing hundreds of people per day, and the only effective way to stop it from continue growing exponentially was to ensure everyone stayed put for a few days.
How is that "not a valid justification" ?
I mean, think about it for a second: law enforcement impose lockdowns on neighborhoods when a shooter is on the loose without any complain, and asking everyone to stay put to avoid hundreds being killed is not "a valid justification" ?
There is no actual proof that forcing everyone to "stay put for a few days" actually saved any lives. Your comment is a complete non sequitur. And, hypothetically, even if it did save lives that is not valid justification for violating the fundamental human right of peaceful assembly. (And no, there is no human right to be protected from risks.)
...it didn't stop it. Lockdowns didn't do anything. We had 14 days to stop the spread, and that was roughly 700 days ago. There isn't any evidence that lockdowns work at all.
Why are you a fascist?
What consequences should they face? They are democratically elected. If the handling was indeed as terrible as you suggest I am sure they'll face the consequences in the next election.
Just look at how much we've learnt about corona viruses these last two years. Many widely accepted truths today might have been considered misinformation early on in the pandemic.
- flip flopping on mask policy
- surface transmission
- vaccine efficacy
- herd immunity
- natural immunity
- gain of function
I'm not going to argue whether or not this was best course of action, because there's no way to know what the alternate reality would look like.
It is however an interesting revelation about the character of our leaders.
In their mind, the ends justify the means, in so far as they unilaterally define both the ends and the means. Who knows what else they lie about for the "greater good".
Can you point out what was in your opinion the best example of what you described as "noble lie"?
I've seen people throwing baseless accusations by misrepresenting basic guidances, such as how avoiding scarcity of personal safety equipment like latex gloves and surgical masks in hospitals was distorted into "first they state masks don't work but now they flipflop into arguing they do".
Thus, to avoid personal subjective takes and keep this discussion on the facts, what exactly do you see as the best example of this "noble lie"?
Many countries acknowledge it as a valid alternative to the vaccine. But not the USA. There has been no change in policy. Not even a public acknowledgment, let alone an apology for getting it wrong.
Is this out of ignorance? malice? Neither, it's simply pragmatic.
Reliably testing for prior infections at population scale would be really slow, expensive, and faulty. Further there's no real downside to vaccinating someone with a prior infection (slightly higher incidence of side effects notwithstanding).
Further, people will lose the urgency to get the vaccine if they think they have antibodies.
Monolithic policy is cheaper than nuanced policy, and monolithic policy only works if its dead simple. So, better to have everyone believe the vaccine is the one and only solution than to actually concern themselves with the truth.
There are also many examples of "verbatim" lies, such as these:
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
What exactly do you mean by "works"?
I mean, it's well established that those who contract COVID and didn't died from it will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.
But that is not the point of a vaccine, is it?
The point of the vaccine is that it trains your immune system to fight an infection without undergoing the risk of a real infection. So that the odds you die from COVID are lower, if not residual.
Consequently, we see the bulk of all deaths from COVID comprised of unvaccinated individuals.
But other than all the dead, those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.
Is that what you mean by "Natural immunity works"? That if you ignore all those unvaccinated people who died then the ones that lived through a COVID infection didn't died?
Because the whole point of a vaccine is that people don't have to die from a preventable disease, isn't it?
Let me make it easy:
1. majority of infections happened pre-vaccine rollout.
2. we created a system that locked people out based on vaccine status.
3. the system should have included those with natural immunity.
/q
There is no nuance. The message couldn't be clearer: if you take the vaccine then the odds you'll die from COVID are way lower than if you do not.
And reality does not lie: the bulk of COVID deaths come from unvaccinated people.
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/04/scicheck-covid-19-data-com...
Enough with all this misinformed or disinformed bullshit.
> it's well established that those who contract COVID .. will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.
> those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.
It seems like we're on the same page here.
i.e let's lie and say natural immunity does _not_ work, that way people are more likely to get vaccinated. It's for their own good, the common folk don't know any better!
Look at Japan and Russia. Japan was highly compliant with lockdowns, masks, and vaccine inoculation. Russia was the exact opposite. The difference being trust in institutions. You could argue lives were lost in Russia because of the inherent distrust.
In parallel, the USA was caught telling blatant lies. This is exactly what spooked and outraged so many people ultimately fueling the anti-vax movement. "If they're lying about this, what else are they lying about?"
No truth, no trust. The USA lost trust, and lost lives as a result.
Many more people would have skipped out on getting it because they thought they had COVID. Because their immunity had waned or because they never really had COVID. I personally know someone that didn't get vaccinated because she had COVID previously. She caught it again in the Delta wave and it killed her. She never had a verified diagnosis the first time, so she may not have had it. But, even if she did, getting vaccinated would have likely boosted her immunity.
The former is clearly not true with regards to COVID. That is why we have been having waves of high infection rates, as the new variants get quickly distributed widely.
Have you seen how bad Sweden's numbers were? It was vaunted as a story of the success of let it rip approach, but the end result was to show the failure of the let it rip approach.
And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed. The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The immune system doesn't "lock onto“ part of the virus. That's just misinformation and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the adaptive immune system works.
Reality does not agree with you.
Sweden fared rather poorly when compared with comparable countries such as Norway, Finland, or Denmark.
* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/
* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/
* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/
There is no way around it: Sweden had more covid-related deaths than Norway, Finland, and Denmark bundled together.
Denmark had 500k more cases than Sweden, but only endured a quarter of Sweden's death count.
This does not fit the definition of "quite good". These are awful numbers. Awful numbers that were easily avoidable if Sweden followed the example of any of its neighbors.
> And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed.
You've got it exactly backwards. The vaccine uses only a part of the S-protein, whereas a natural infection exposes the body to the full S-protein and N-protein. In theory and in practice, the immune system can train on more viral features via natural infection than it can via vaccine.
> The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.
It really doesn't. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
> We present a systematic review and pooled analysis of clinical studies to date that (1) specifically compare the protection of natural immunity in the COVID-recovered versus the efficacy of complete vaccination in the COVID-naive ... it supports the pooled findings in finding superiority of natural immunity over-vaccination ... Consequently, no study could conclude the superiority of vaccination protection over natural immunity with statistical confidence, but observational studies endorsed an advantage for protection by natural immunity. [7]
[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/sweden_coronavirus_full_vacci...
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34089610/
[3] https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/
[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-75...
[5] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
[6] https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
He found himself in a tough situation, having to tell inconvenient truths to a President that had every reason to downplay the virus because he had up to that point a very strong economy and was up for re-election in less than a year. Guess what—that’s a key part of the job for a high level government official. Politics always influences the theoretically neutral scientific agencies, and diplomatically handling such situations is essential. Trump wasn’t some singularity in this regard: he was more bombastic in his rhetoric, but the rush to normalize things in advance of an election wasn’t unique to him: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/ba2-omicr...
In this context, a competent public official would (1) jealously guard his credibility; and (2) assure the public that he understands that controlling the pandemic isn’t the only thing people care about. Fauci has consistently failed to do either. He made assertions about masking, natural immunity, and schools that we’re ill-advised and turned out to be wrong. And he has shown no ability to convey to the public that he understands the balancing of competing social interests. With him, it’s always about the most cautious approach.
Fauci is a good illustration of why it’s dangerous to put wonks in public-facing leadership positions. There’s an argument that someone in Fauci’s position should just focus on the most cautious possible approach and leave the balancing of competing policy interests to elected officials. But in a pandemic, the public will look to health officials for leadership and guidance. They’re not just in the back room crunching numbers for the political decision makers.
I think Fauci is hyper political, he's just not optimizing for truth but for institutional staying power. And it worked! America suffered the consequences, but he held onto his job and half the U.S. worships him.
Collins 12 year term is the longest in recent history, and 3rd overall.
https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nih-dir...
No they're not. The only person in the Executive branch (which includes all cabinet positions) who is elected is the President, with whoever their VP is riding along on the ticket..
I wouldn't extend this to the President's cabinet, as these people aren't known to us when voting.
Which is the bigger point, since that is who makes up the government. Not just the cabinet heads, but all of the undersecretaries and department heads etc. There are hundreds (or more) of appointed positions in the Executive Branch. People like Fauci have never been elected to anything so I don't see how the comment I replied to can make that stance.
But I also don't think public servants (Fauci etc) should be punished. Again, for what crime? They receive orders, in the form of laws, court decisions or executive orders from elected representatives. As long as they fulfill their duties implementing those orders they are not responsible for the consequences in the eyes of the law.
The elected representatives are however responsible for the laws and directives they make. And they do face that responsibility when they meet the voters. Ultimately the voters are responsible to elect sensible people.
To the contrary they will be rewarded.
The west tried to rely on its supranational institution to establish top-down consensus and then couldn't react to its failure.
Ostensibly Asian countries are part of the WHO, so why was it that the decision-makers there weren't able to adapt? Doesn't China supposedly have a significant influence on the WHO? Why didn't they intervene?
[0] https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2020/avoiding_the_three_cs.ht...
It is easy to focus on what scientists got wrong about the virus, but it's equally important to point out what was right. In retrospect, the early data about the nature of the virus itself was pretty spot on.
Modelling pandemics is really hard, even before this virus, and we've only gotten better. Coordinating a specific global response is even harder.
Wait, I think your mental model is out of date. OP is all about how COVID-19 is indeed airborne [1] — i.e. it can float through air for considerable distances — and how it took a long time for WHO to correct its messaging. I guess this is case-in-point on how initial public messaging can be really hard to correct later on, and needs to be corrected quickly and loudly.
This is hardly a radical notion. Ferguson's useless 2001 era foot-and-mouth models relied heavily on the idea that the virus would be spread by the wind between nearby farms, even if there was no close physical contact between animals. The field of "aerobiology" investigates this topic (whether our understanding of what can survive long distance travel might be flawed). If this is correct then it'd explain many otherwise unexplainable facts about COVID and influenza, like the way outbreaks start and stop more or less simultaneously over huge geographic areas.
It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine! On the flip side, it was aggravating to see moronic restaurants building enclosed outdoor tents to meet the requirements of "outdoor dining". Sure, they meet the legal requirements, but for the health requirements?
Shame the recall didn't go through.
State of Jefferson FTW.
The problem with trips to the beach during the height of a pandemic isn't that a couple of people sitting far apart on a beach have anything to worry about. In theory it'd be fine, but people ruin everything.
They swing by multiple houses to pick up a bunch of friends for their day at the beach, drive in from out of town, stop at the store for food and drinks and sun screen, then stop to get gas, then get to the beach and see thousands of other people have decided to do the same thing (see https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-thousands-flock-to-be...) and now you have crowds of people who might as well be at a music festival or motorcycle rally.
Yeah, people (especially those who are making great sacrifices to prevent the spread of a virus and protect their community) are going to be upset at the massive beach parties going on. It's annoying to get left out of a party even when it isn't undermining your efforts to lower the number of infections and deaths in your neighborhood.
> with regards to Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on. I remember seeing specials on NHK visualising the spread from a sneezing person in a room in March 2020.
Sneezing would be the droplets distribution theory, which is now "debunked". If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.
Droplets only? Do you not find sneezing to be a highly effective method of spreading airborne pathogens?
> If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.
You’re essentially saying, “if the virus was airborne it could be spread through coughs too” to which the NHK study says, “yes, and sneezes.”
But they studied coughs too https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H2azcn7MqOU
This is evidence that China in fact doesn't have as big influence as people believe.
"China has taken over WHO" is just a dishonest, evidence-free narrative by people who politicize the issue because they don't want to accept the WHO having anything good to say about China.
At the time of the outbreak, the US administration was under a populist leader who saw the virus as an almost personal attack; emphasizing that mask wearing, and the implicit recognition that the virus spread by air, was a political symbol directed against him.
Funny how people forget this.
Early on when people were still often forgetting to stay farther away from strangers I seriously considered switching to doing my grocery shopping between my morning workout and my morning shower to discourage people from getting too close.
I did switch to doing my grocery shopping early in the morning and it turned out there were so few people shopping then that it was easy to avoid them, except sometimes at checkout when the person behind me in line might stand too close.
That was easy to deal with by simply standing in front of my shopping cart when in line instead of behind it. That way I could decide how close to stand to the person in front of me, and the person behind me had to at least stay a shopping cart's length back.
Bwahahahaaaaaaah! Covid strikes again! You cannot get away!
Yes, but Japan is a leader in airborne disease prevention.
I mean, if you visit Japan during a "normal" winter season you will observe two things:
1) Widespread mask-wearing in public spaces
2) Japanese not turning up to work to cough and splutter all over their colleagues
The Japanese mentality of taking into account the impact of your actions on others has served them well.
That is why Japan has seen less than 1/10th of the COVID cases that, for example, the UK had. Despite Japan being 2x UK population and living/working in SIGNIFICANTLY higher density.
Nowadays, working a remote job, I can work if it's just a cough, and it won't affect my co-workers. Never thought about this benefit of remote work!
UK 21,461,556 cases, 313,247 cases/1M, 2,468 deaths/1M, 68,513,217 Pop
Japan 6,832,377 cases, 54,313 cases/1M, 226 deaths/1M, 125,795,510 Pop
(data from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/japan-covid-...
It will take decades and much cooler heads to determine the winners and losers. Trying to claim the winners and losers right now is a fools errand.
Just because they ended up in the hospital for "other" reasons doesn't mean it wasn't Covid--someone we know recently lost her mother that way. Health issues that were under control--then they weren't. Coincidence that she tests positive after being admitted?? I don't think so!
There's also the reality that some people are clotting out in various fashions when they aren't nearly sick enough to warrant the hospital and thus likely aren't even tested. If the clot hits someplace quickly lethal (heart, brain, lungs) they end up in the morgue without ever being diagnosed.
There are organizations & researchers. They don’t speak with one voice, or have the same threat assessment, and they respond to different incentives.
It would be a gift to humanity to move beyond the antiquated idea that there are “FACTS” - static statements of truth that require no context or qualification.
Not only does context matter, it matters that we can have exploratory conversations in ambiguous contexts.
I'd say it's a significant number. Wouldn't want to lose the chance to ever get a research project funded again.
For example, what the scientific community understood about efficacy of masks, and how utterly useless cloth masks are, disappeared overnight with covid. Perhaps your memory is failing you but I can recall people being chastised for even suggesting they might be useless. And don't even bother trying to spin some bullshit about it's better than nothing. Attaching a cloth to your face and exposing it to warm/wet air all day is a great way to start a personal mold culture you can breathe in later. And before you try to say "well you should wash them after each use", how many people do you think actually do that?
And if you wanna get real spicy, let's talk about the "science" behind transgenderism. Discovered by your favorite tumblr user, and beaten into pop culture by the woke mob.
There's a ton of evidence supporting this, and it doesn't help your argument to deny it.
https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...
Litterally orders of magnitude.
Consider me crucified.
Remember that “news” is at best entertainment and at worst performance art. If somebody says “the current situation is bad, assuming our model is correct”, it’s reported as “the current situation is bad” so any change is seems as nefarious. It’s just the lizard brains overpowering the neocortexes.
Is that a fact, or opinion?
It’s an important observation, so you must communicate it to others. You perform a speech act to tell a few colleagues, with utterances and gesticulations to describe your observation as closely as possible. Is your oral exposition a fact?
You must communicate the observation widely for the good of society. You write a Tweet thread, and publish a scientific paper to the journals. Are these written productions also facts?
It’s retweeted, and a summary of the preprint is published to nature.com. Facts?
Colloquially, most people would refer to all of these things as facts. And each one is a carefully constructed human artifact, whether it’s sensory data imported and stored in your brain, a speech utterance, a Tweet, or a scientific article.
The emphasis on absoluteness of facts in (American) public discussion nowadays is sometimes quite hysterical.
I'll muddy the waters here: neither, it is a belief.
I prefer to avoid the term "fact" b/c it leads to too many arguments, just as is happening here. Rather than "facts" we have beliefs and some things we believe more than others.
--------------------------
"...in this analysis we shall approximate the horse by a sphere of radius r..."
- physicist's monologue in joke about racehorses, engineers, chemists and physicists.> I prefer to avoid the term "fact" b/c it leads to too many arguments
Arguments are not a bad thing. Avoiding them by muddying language is a bad thing.
Beliefs about questions of fact may be, facts are not. At least, by the usual definition of “fact”.
If we’re just redefining words, sure, whatever.
Our myopic focus on Covid to the almost literal exclusion of everything else had a disastrous outcome. Government refused to balance Covid against other problems in society. And the result is the mess we will be cleaning up for quite some time.
Major changes such as, er, occasionally opening a window to let some fresh air in? That's a basic, obvious precaution that's been known since the dawn of time that wasn't done at all in the UK hospital ward where my mother caught and then died from Covid late last year. I know because I was there. The cluelessness re. viral spread almost two years into the pandemic was just astounding and I'm still very, very angry about it.
i’m sorry for your loss. there’s no doubt that governmental denial and reckless mismanagement - especially prevalent in the early days of the pandemic - is directly responsible for the deaths of many. the whole thing has been utterly shambolic.
honestly though, that’s not the thing that angers me the most. it’s the large number of people that think the government handled the pandemic well.
i think we’re doomed as a country, potentially even a species.
I agree.
During the first months I would be willing to cut decision-makers some slack (on certain aspects, blatantly poor decision-making is different).
6–12 months in, I was becoming very frustrated at the distinct lack of learning going on.
But as you say, two years in. There is ZERO excuse.
No company should have unfettered control over the metaphorical "town square" to control population-level discourse.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
It's fine because you didn't intend to harm anyone, but now that you know it's dangerous, if you kept spreading that public data, we would know you intended harm and your behaviour would be rightly considered malinformation. That would be double plus bad.
Perspective changes over time, and I have no doubt that the "town squares" will adapt into forms unrecognizable to those of us alive now, but to simply throw our hands up in the air a cede all control of public discourse to unaccountable entities is an abhorent thought.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri
Except instead of there being only seven, Sauron mass-produced them and now everyone has one, maybe two. Hardly nobody even meets at the Prancing Pony anymore, at least without a palantíri call first.
Is it though? If someone makes an unfounded guess and states it as fact isn't it fair to call that misinformation even if that turns out to be correct?
What would be your preferred approach?
You made a category error by somehow replacing "opinions which are obvious nonsense" with "any dissenting opinion whatsoever".
Nobody but you suggested that. The claim was that you cannot say anything at all about any "dissenting opinion" unless you are 100% sure you are correct. That is nonsense. You can obviously say something about some of them, while not being confident enough to rule out some others.
That's perfectly right, if you yourself aren't making guesses.
What we got? People without a full understanding of the subject matter themselves acting as if they were the ultimate authority on SARS-CoV-2, and a cadre of sympathetic globalist-oriented corporations uncritically deferring to them in the extreme. It’s like some of the supposedly smartest people in the world just have their brains leak out their ears simply because a three-letter agency with such apparently big words such as “world” and “health” in the full name make some pronouncements and broker no argument.
The appropriate approach would be to state "given current arguments, we are not sure whether it is airborne or not" instead of doubling down on their assumption/guess.
To the best of their knowledge , at the time, that was what the evidence pointed to. Then, as more evidence surfaced they realized that those assumptions didn't hold (and that could change again in the future with new research).
- A claim is made with apparently uncontested evidence like a video, picture, quote, article, or endorsement.
- Knowledgeable viewers see the story and realize something is wrong.
- Meanwhile, the original claim starts to get spread by the "credible" media such as newspapers, TV, and online publications.
- Critics then mock and complain on social media about the claim.
- The regular news eventually catches up and makes new stories over the corrected claim without a reference to their original claims.
Hold these people accountable and don't give them your attention. Journalism has lost much of it's integrity.
It's sad that people are too proud to cooperate with other people working in other domains (and sometimes even in the same domain).
She believes the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen”, partly by being hacked by China (the Mr. Pillow Guy CEO hypothesis). She knows nothing about the details of the domain, but she has a strong conviction opinion on the topic. I spent a lot of time investigating what evidence was publicly available and was thoroughly unconvinced.
Is it “sad” that I am “too proud” to adopt her logic/thinking/chain of facts?
Or is it simply that the domain experts are overwhelmed with noise (bad ideas from non-domain-experts)?
The default mentality of scientists should be skepticism of conclusions and creativity/curiosity for hypotheses. That’s a difficult mindset for one individual. There is a reason why red teams and blue teams are specialized.
I agree you cannot go down the rabbit hole by checking what everyone is saying. But there are experts in other domains who can present proof in their domain. And then it's silly not to listen.
He really looked at a few superspread events and drilled down in how it could've spread.
We have learned that while medical doctors are domain experts in treating diseases, they are not domain experts in how infectious diseases spread around. Some doctors follow the front lines of science, whereas other doctors refuse to update their knowledge, and stick to what their old textbooks say.
And we have learned that when it comes to airborne diseases, even epidemiologists are not domain experts. Epidemiologist are more trained in statistics and abstract mathematical models. With statistics, they know how to observe epidemics. With mathematical models, that can make bad predictions on how the epidemic progresses, but these predictions turned out to be wrong more often than not. Now nobody makes these predictions anymore, they have lost credibility.
But they are not trained in physics to actually understand the physical mechanisms of how the virus can spread from one person to others.
And that public health is also a matter of economics and engineering, and again medical doctors are not good domain experts here. Medical doctors can advice you not to drink dirty water, but population scale water hygiene is a matter of civil engineering. If we want air hygiene, we have to turn to engineers.
And they are pretty bad at that too… their models have been horrifically bad. Most of them seemed designed to show the absolute worst case (see all the hockey stick charts these people published)…
It seems the responsible thing to do in this situation, rather than tweeting definitively that the virus was "NOT" spread via airborne transition, would've been too withhold judgement...at minimum. The ideal thing to do would've been to at least acknowledge the countless scenarios that gained media attention which seemed to heavily indicate airborne transmission, while prefacing it that these scenarios aren't themselves sufficient to confirm that.
It happens, it's a group run by humans. It would be great if they got everything correct, but unfortunately they don't, and to make matters worse, it sounds like they're an organization driven by consensus so changing minds means changing a bunch of individual doctors minds. Take it from me that changing doctors' minds on things is a sisyphean task. We're lucky we got a correction in 2 years.
Hopefully they learned something for any further pandemics. But the other factor of this is that communicating to people is difficult, and if you change your mind publicly and loudly too many times people lose faith in you. And unfortunately faith/belief is what people need to have in the WHO for it to be effective at giving advice.
People want a lot of things. That does not automatically mean that appealing to it is the right thing to do.
They needed to be comfortable with saying : "We don't know that yet."
1. Virus is not airborne (as initially claimed). I thought the water droplets claims were true for a while until I saw how fast it spread. It didn't make sense to me that a virus that is dragged onto the ground by water droplets would spread with such speed.
2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.
The only bullshit I wasn't able to capitalize on was SPX crashing. I calculated that it should have fallen to less than $1000/share (closer to $500), based on past panic sell patterns, which was obviously not a guarantee, but the government stepped in and I missed out on quite a bit of money. I still think bailing out rich people's money in the stock market was complete bullshit on behalf of the government (but what do I know?).
I know it's all in retrospect now, so it seems like I'm tooting my own horn here, but at the time, it wasn't easy to be the guy who said "see ya guys, I'm going to hide from a virus that's going to turn into a global pandemic and you should all be doing the same because it's the logical thing to do based on the known facts". Even my manager (who approved my request to WFH) looked at me like I'm the token crazy guy from sci-fi movies holding "the end is nigh" sign.
I wish more people thought critically and had healthy skepticism towards all the information they receive, not just the part they disagree with. I was never a fan of blindly trusting anything. I trust, but I verify.
By "everyone" do you mean people around where you live? The CDC was always concerned about mortality rates and never suggested it was just a flu/cold.
In Feb 2020 I recall hearing the president say the flu/cold thing, however the CDC was always trying to say it is serious. They were just not clear on where it had spread yet, and due to a testing screw-up, it was undertracked at the beginning. Also, at that time the CDC was saying healthy people didn't need to wear masks -- because it wasn't yet a pandemic and there still wasn't research indicating that masks protect the wearer.
In mid January we heard there was a new version of a SARS-like virus, and around January 21 China finally acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission.
Taiwan noticed news about isolated cases of an unknown virus on Dec. 31 2019, and had tipped off the WHO of possible human-to-human transmission. I don't think the wider public world knew about it until after January 12 or so, and it wasn't confirmed to transmit among humans until over a week later, despite suspected illness among doctors and nurses. AFAIK China still has not shared details about who was infected during that early period.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revise...
Here’s an article with some quotes from people who were young during polio pandemics describing the countermeasures: https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-...
You can’t even call the US response a lock down. My friends abroad had to register with the government to leave their homes to visit a neighborhood market.
We didn’t have anything like that.
The US had a more coordinated and stricter response to BLM protests, sending the national guard in to enforce curfews and shooting paint rounds at citizens sitting on their suburban porches.
To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that by going out of the house you have a 1.17% chance of dying, but if you stay inside, that chance is 0.002% (average chance of dying on any given day in US), would you still go outside or would you stay inside?
That 1.17% is a 585x increase over the usual 0.002%, and when I thought about how large that increase is, for me, it was very clearly not worth the risk.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Most countries were already in the process of announcing health restrictions by February 2020. Taiwan had already been screaming for 2 months that it was airborne, and had limited airline travel and started mask mandates.
Not in the UK, the situation in Italy was all over our news.
Probably the biggest criticism I have of the UK media was their overemphasis on young people succumbing. The stats said that young people were unlikely to die but we were presented with cases of that almost daily.
Old people in most countries in europe are rather lonely, whereas in Italy they crowd the streets of every town in the evenings. I could imagine in such an enviroment, a low-deadliness-fast-spreading disease could cause a very rapid collapse in a hospital system.
That turned out to be a surprisingly small minority.
What is still a shame is that no ventilation standards have been raised by law because of lobbying. It would make a lot of difference probably of what I read by experts.
Certainly, after the outbreak escaped China, the only thing I remember finding surprising about the pandemic was how badly the West handled it. A lot of people had exactly the same takeaway.
Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.
I've had some relatives die, I've spent large portions of the pandemic cooped up inside with kids, I've missed funerals, etc - and I think earlier in the pandemic, I was probably about as emotionally engaged as you are, except, in the other direction. Now, I don't really have much of an opinion about it. Why do you continue to care?
I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office continued to stay at the office due to their boss not allowing WFH.
I'm thankful that my family and I were in Singapore for 2020/2021. Now we are in Taiwan.
That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1]
> At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone.
> His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia.
https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...
Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019. The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
That's not true, as the Time report clearly states. Cases have been dated back to October/November by analysis, not by news reports.
It's also worth noting that the WHO's own website does not mention that Taiwan told them about the Wuhan news report [1],
> WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China.
They received word about that "media statement" from Taiwan. The "media statement" was later deleted, but not before it was screenshotted and distributed on PTT, a Taiwanese social network.
> The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
China did not allow these statements to be made public until around January 20 when they finally stated human-to-human transmission was confirmed. At first they detained doctors who tried to speak out.
Taiwan was the first to publicly call it SARS. In early January they sent a team to visit Wuhan, then came back and said "this is SARS".
That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
Huh? Taiwan did make the WHO aware.
> That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
There is no public record about this novel coronavirus, later called Covid-19, prior to Dec 31 2019. China kept it under wraps. Wuhan doctors knew but they were not allowed to speak out. When they tried, they were detained and threatened with arrest.
Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
From The facts regarding Taiwan’s email to alert WHO to possible danger of COVID-19, [1]
> To be prudent, in the email we took pains to refer to atypical pneumonia, and specifically noted that patients had been isolated for treatment. Public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease.
The email text is in this Taipei Times article [2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...
[2] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/04/12/2...
> Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
So you don't believe it's possible, at all, for rumours to have been running around prior to the 31st, that there was a possible sars outbreak, prior to Taiwan getting some sort of evidence to submit to the WHO to request information about what's going on.
We seem to have miscommunicated. When you wrote "We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019" I thought you meant you had heard about a confirmed outbreak reported by some reliable news source, not rumors.
What I meant to underscore was that this knowledge did not become public prior to Taiwan notifying the WHO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...
By 'we' I meant my family and I. My wife is Taiwanese and her family said to be careful because people are saying there was a possible sars outbreak.
It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
I guess that's possible as a rumor. I had taken the other comment to mean there was publicly verified information at that time. Perhaps we just miscommunicated.
Certainly Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan, who later died of covid, had told friends in a private messaging group [1] to take precautions because something SARS-like was back.
> It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
Parts of China, maybe. I wouldn't say "in Asia" as if all of Japan, Taiwan, SE Asia knew.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...
This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020.
It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.”
> I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism
The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health.
I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.
They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.
Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.
If the government is competing for masks with regular citizens, they had already failed years before. And they did, spectacularly.
Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?
(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
“But it was impossible to predict!” that the mask was useful. Well, Pr Raoult did. Many doctors did. Government can’t claim innocence “by being wrongly advised” after implementing nationwide policies without knowing anything correct AND banning criticism on Facebook.
You can’t claim innocence when you perform wilful censorship.
The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly
The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become.
So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers.
The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out.
What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.
It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
[1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...
Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.
No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.
Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.
This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.
Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:
1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.
2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.
[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.
If they truly worked to a level that justified their use, I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics. Thus far, I see no evidence of that. You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
No, not in the slightest. The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets. The experimental evidence also supports it.
The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed. The disturbing thing is that we did not initially err on the side of caution.
> I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics.
It doesn't have to have a massive impact to be useful.
> You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
"Same basic shape". What, you mean up then down, as new variants emerged, and seasonal effects were encountered? How are you assessing that they are the same shape? Have you done an analysis against all countries with reliable data or are you eyeballing the graphs from a few cherry-picked regions by a blogger?
You're making two mistakes here, that mask advocates frequently make:
1. At the time this decision was made there was no evidence that masks would have any effect. That's why public health officials around the world were saying they'd have no effect. It wasn't a noble lie, they were actually telling the truth about masks at the start and we can see that by simply searching the literature for evidence masks are effective that predate March 2020. Thus there is no justification for this policy given evidence based decision making.
2. Your claim about what's logical is predicated on the belief that COVID spreads through large droplets of water. This isn't how it works. COVID spreads like a gas, against which masks are useless.
> The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed
If masks don't work then the risk of health systems being overwhelmed is irrelevant. And they don't work, that's the point you keep trying to avoid.
But equally as important: the downsides of the policy are far, far greater than "minor inconvenience". If you really believe that's the only downside you have no business forming opinions on health matters at all.
Firstly: wearing masks is unnatural and not surprisingly, doing that for too long breaks things. Things like children.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1592670/covid-news-babies-...
The UK education regulator has just issued a report about delays in babies development and struggles with responding to basic facial expressions. They say “Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”
There are certainly many other problems, think of the enormous trash problem it creates too.
Secondly, the policy is incredibly destructive in other ways. The entire population spent the last two years being forced to go along with an obviously incorrect and pointless rule, along with absurd caveats like restaurant physics. It's utterly destructive to people's confidence in public health and the ability of governments to make rational decisions. If anyone ever needs any reason to doubt public health ever again, about anything, masks is all the justification they'll ever need.
Nonsense. The virus spreads primarily through salivary droplets. Please don't peddle this rubbish.
There is some aerosol transmission, but most infections happen at short range. Masks aren't perfectly effective but they do help, and that has saved lives.
If you don't even understand the basic science then educate yourself before commenting.
If you want more evidence, try:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/
SARS-1 spread through an apartment building by using drain pipes. No droplet transmission is capable of that. For SARS-CoV-2 the same thing happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty. This was very early evidence the spread-through-droplets theory couldn't be correct, but was ignored by public health.
Again, absolute nonsense.
World Health Organisation:
"Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, for example at a conversational distance. The virus can spread from an infected person’s mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing or breathe."[0]
> People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty.
No one is disputing that the virus spreads through aerosol distribution. The majority of spread is through salivary droplets. Is your argument seriously that because there is some aerosol spread, that somehow disproves the model that spread is mainly through salivary droplets?
If you are unable to understand the argument I don't see how we can continue the conversation.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cor...
How much impact can we see at the time of introduction and removal? Zero. In all those graphs the curve continues exactly on its previous trend line.
Your point would be valid if there was a visible impact and we were trying to establish how much of that came from masks. But we aren't trying to disentangle cause and effect here, because there's no effect to establish a cause for. If there's no effect then masks cannot be the cause, can they?
I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation):
Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health.
So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks.
To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...
Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.... After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m. Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms. “That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill. Everybody came with their own sheet music and avoided direct physical contact. Some members helped set up or remove folding chairs. A few helped themselves to mandarins that had been put out on a table in back.
Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer. The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface. But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...
Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.
The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny.
Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes.
In fact we're still there even after millions of dead.
The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months.
But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.
It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.
The way I remember this but of recent history, initial r0 values were seem as a strong indication of absence of aerial transmission, because all the known airborn viruses are have an r0 so much higher than the observed values in the low single-digit range. Those just don't ever encounter a population that isn't already quite immunized since childhood. The reasoning went "if it was airborne, we'd see an r0 many times bigger". What they did not consider was that perhaps it was airborne, just not very good at infecting humans. Recent mutations certainly are, and if those had appeared from the start there wouldn't have been any doubts about the airborne nature of the virus.
("Exponential" kicks in even at an r0 of 1.001, but then of course hard immunity would be quickly achieved because it would not take many to push r(eff) below 1)
I would wager that is something no one from the CDC ever said, wrote, or implied.
They told people they would not benefit from using N95 masks, which was damaging enough.
People have already wrote a lot about this, but one of my biggest frustrations was with how slow the CDC was to recommend masks in general. Waiting on what should have been an obvious recommendation was a large contributor.
Perhaps our protagonist realizes that lying will save countless lives, but he must fall on his own sword when the deception is revealed. Then, according to plan, he is publicly shamed and fired in order for his agency to retain any credibility.
I posit that for the purposes of psychological/mental health, it is not worth it to live in a system run through deception. It is also civically dangerous because the habit of lying can be so easily transposed from a selfless telos to a selfish one - and, conveniently, lied about. If it is possible, I would rather die so that someone else is spared having to live in a deceptive system. Do I have the right to impose that decision on others, though? I say no. It's their responsibility to make that choice.
WHO and other health authorities sent the entire world into sanitization frenzy.
The new variants are now as infectious as measles. We can only hope that new variants remain mild and / or limited in danger by current and developing vaccines.
[0] https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-maurice-de-hond-in-het-coron...
Fair enough, I'd say
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... <--- 2021
Yes, there were issues with the pandemic rollout that need to be prevented from happening in the future, without doubt. But trying to find blame for either organization, which have been hammered by a massive, organized and relentless campaign of misinformation is a waste of time. They were being attacked daily by both Russian bots and, by extension their representatives here in the US, the Republicans. Of course they made mistakes.
If the U.S. hadn't been destabilized by Russia, there would have been a much more clear headed response. Placing any blame on the CDC or the WHO has no purpose. It was Russia.
(We need to pardon the Jan 6th insurrectionists and start a nationwide effort to educate the people about how badly they have been deceived and then we need to do whatever possible to ensure regime change in Russia.)
Also, you seem to forgetting the WHO's interesting relationship with China. You seem so anti Russia you are missing the country who actually manipulated the WHO.
Does it mean that masks and social distancing were actually useful? Or the opposite?
Closed spaces: ventilation or HEPA filters are necessary.
Think of cigarette smoke: if you can smell it, you’d get the virus
So yeah blind disrespect for authorities has a much better track record.
Who is "they"?
I've heard people, such as Biden and Harris, say they didn't trust Trump to give correct vaccine information and would make their decisions on when to take a vaccine based on what doctors say.
Quite a good summary for the entire clusterfuck that was the pandemic response. I still cant wrap my head about the utter spineless idiocy. You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong, you do so by lying to protect your image despite knowing better. You being wrong isnt dependent on you acknowledging it.
And the worst part, the more they kept lying the more they created a vocal minority who heavily drank the coolaid loosing the ability to even consider that the god like apparatus could be wrong.
I agree the not changing your mind is worse, but they also describe this thing as being driven by consensus as doctors, so you're having to change a bunch of people's minds who think they're the very best at what they do. It's a serious failing of that setup. It's somewhat impressive that they ever changed their mind.
But at a deeper level, it shows that they should have been more careful with the messaging from the start. The actual message should have been "There's currently not enough evidence to say COVID is airborne" which is a lot easier to correct to "Actually, it appears that it is airborne" than going from saying it definitely wasn't and being completely wrong...
The masks thing was also just crazy. Completely indefensible, claiming that "we had to lie because otherwise people would have panic-bought masks" just destroys trust even more into the future...
You don't get to decide how people respond to a flip-flop, so you're strongly incentivized to make them as quiet as possible because it's not valued in our society to learn from your mistakes. We just want people who were correct the first time.
If you pick a stock, and it goes up you claim you know something about it. If you pick a stock and it goes down and then up, you still point to the stock that you got correct the first time.
Also, if you read the article, it's not that they didn't think it was airborne. It was that they didn't believe in airborne viruses. The common wisdom was that viruses are too heavy to stay airborne long enough for them to think it possible to become sick from that.
I think you are talking about Fauci's flip-flop here. The point is not about his flip-flop on mask mandate. The point was about his confidence. You do not go and say confidently, on National TV, that masks don't stop the virus and that people should stop buying masks from stores as it is needed for emergency workers. Then turn around half a year later, after the pandemic is in full swing and say that masks are important as it stops the virus. Both times he said it he said that it is based on credible scientific evidence. This is what ticks people off.
If you do not know something and have no facts to back up your claim, don't say it. If you want to still say it (as you don't want people to hoard masks), appeal to the people to not hoard masks out of fear as those masks are needed for the frontline workers. Better still, get the US Government to buy those masks or ban stores from selling masks to general public until you have equipped frontline workers. Then ease the ban. Do not lie by saying that masks don't prevent virus as it sends a negative message and reassurance that everything is fine. Then turn around half a year later and say it is dangerous! This sort of flip-flop is not acceptable to anyone. Especially when it comes to disaster response.
You are an expert for a reason. People trust your words. You are in a position of power when it comes to your own field. Don't degrade/misuse that position.
The reason WHO lost its credibility is because of it shutting down alternative takes, continuous flip-flops and ever changing directives/mandates.
It would have been better if WHO started by saying "We don't know. It is a novel virus. We are still learning as we go along. We will issue directives as and when we get more information. Please note that these directives are temporary and only based on evidence we have right in front of us. If things change, we will keep you informed. We still aren't sure what to make of it". This is all WHO needed to do. This would have instilled a bit of fear yes (which in hindsight was actually needed to make lockdowns effective and mask mandates effective). You took away the "fear" factor at the very beginning of the virus outbreak and then when people got the message, you try to tell them to now start fearing the virus. Why would people buy your argument? And how many of them will take you seriously after such a drastic flip-flop? Rather than confidently put out statements that the virus isn't airborne or doesn't spread through contact WHO should have been honest from the start. That it doesn't know anything and is learning as we go along. That the virus maybe dangerous and that we have to be cautious.
Another big one is that WHO announced it is not human-to-human transmissible: https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
"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, #China."
There was no disclaimer to say that this investigation is ongoing. That this preliminary data collected will have a final investigation as well. That it can change as more data becomes available. Communication is key in disaster response. You do not say anything with 100% certainty if you do not know it to be true.
"not transmissible" and "haven't found clear evidence of transmissibility" are not at all the same.
Exhibit A:
"This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong".
Changing this later to "This fact Y (that people were asking about, shh) is true. We won't mention that it contradicts X that much. We won't say we were wrong. We will say that as institution C Org, we have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise is wrong"
VS
Exhibit B:
"We as A Org, have reason to believe that X is the most true thing we know given current knowledge. We acknowledge fact Y exists and are actively investigating it and its implications. For people searching for guidance, A Org recommends actions S,T, and U. We will continue to research and revise information where necessary"
---
I feel like Exhibit A, which is something I see a lot from government entities (confirmation bias makes me want to add "in the US") makes a changing of mind a thing of pride since you've staked a bet on it. A bet which usually is condescending and says "I'm right, you're wrong"
Exhibit B leaves the hatches open while still getting a firm message down based on today's knowledge.
Sadly there's no A/B testing we can turn to to know which approach would be better. But just out of sensibility, I wish more entities engaged in the latter approach
I've noticed a pattern where people will take this as their default assumption, and even selectively read evidence to the contrary in order to maintain that assumption.
For example, a while ago on HN[1], someone posted this link[2] about a CDC announcement titled "CDC director says data 'suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus'". The claim was that the CDC director, Walensky, insisted that vaccinated people do not carry COVID and insisted that they were 90% protected against infection, and the CDC wouldn't walk back on those claims.
However, when reading the article, it shows that the assumption that the CDC was using Exhibit A's method in their announcement was wrong, and the CDC actually used the more reasonable method in your Exhibit B:
> Walensky was referring to a new CDC study of nearly 4,000 front-line workers, some vaccinated and some not, who tested themselves weekly for COVID-19 infections between December and March.
> But more data is still necessary to say so definitively, which is why researchers are recruiting thousands of college students across the country to find out more about the likelihood of asymptomatic spread of this virus among vaccinated people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30649479
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-data-vaccinated...
The evidence for airborne transmission was really low quality at first. It's pretty normal, but very unfortunate, that people get primed to their early experience of new theory and can't see above it.
So is it worth it to be less truthful? Is there good you can accomplish with that trust?
I see what they're playing and the bind they're in. It's a very social kind of game. I'm just too simple to be there or have dealt with it.
They decided to spend public trust to what end?
Politics is being paralyzed by binarism. Everything is Right OR Wrong, left OR right, on OR off. there is no grey areas anymore.. there is no acceptable position that is in between or overlaps.
Disagree, plenty of organizations and people lost credibility in the eyes of some for doing just this as new research emerged over the course of the pandemic.
Like saying: “X could be bad for you”, but offering no evidence, theories or studies. Then it turns out X does have some downsides.
I don’t think you get any credit for having randomly guessed a correct answer.
To me the paths look like:
- acknowledge your mistakes: some people will accept based on your attitude, others will resent you being wrong.
- don't acknowledge: people who would have otherwise accepted mistakes now resent your stubbornness. Others will still resent you for being wrong.
There's an important difference between "The sky will be red tomorrow" and "Based on {data}, I think that the sky will be red tomorrow." even if the reasoning from {data} to "sky red tomorrow" is flawed.
If someone arrives at a conclusion via a process that I can analyse, I expect that they'll arrive at a different conclusion if the data turns out different.
When someone says "{whatever} is true", it's on them, and should be, when {whatever} turns out to be false.
Here's another way to look at it.
Folks who arrive at conclusion in a openly disinterested way can switch conclusions without losing credibility.
People who seem to be interested in a given conclusion lose credibility, and should, when they're wrong. Same for folks who don't show their work.
If you make it about you, you can't complain when it's about you.
Unfortunately, in the public/political realm, I think this isn't true. Flip flopping suggests weak morals. When scientific "facts" change, a lot of people conclude that the scientists know nothing.
Flip flopping for all the right reasons makes all the difference as G-man would say.
He said there would be no requirement for quarantine soon and changed it to "quarantine stays" a day later.
All he did by that was alienating his biggest support group: vaccinated people. While the covidiots are cheering because "they knew it all along". We came out of this with a better solution but still...unnecessary loss of credibility. Next time people will think: I can ignore that, "they" will probably turn it around tomorrow.
The art is to only talk if you're sure what you say.
Unfortunately, you do. It is something that could change and should change. But as of now, changing mind is treated as "gotcha".
There are small vocal minorities all over the spectrum that say all sorts of crap. The WHO isn’t yet only voice of “the system” though and plenty of other services and agencies recognised covid was airborne as soon as the evidence was out.
As for the WHO, they’re a weak politically compromised organisation that was all over the map in their vivid response. Being a political football is by design though, as a UN agency.
Even so, they are also an incredibly important resource for dozens of developing countries that heavily rely on their technical expertise and resources. INHO the answer is to strengthen them and make them more independent and capable if tending off political pressure, but unfortunately their (frankly deserved) credibility hit probably makes that impossible, so they’ll become even more bent out of shape by interference. We do need a credible, well resourced, at least somewhat independent global health organisation though.
They’re are small vocal minorities all over the spectrum that say all sorts of crap. The WHO isn’t the only voice of “the system” though and plenty of other services and agencies recognised covid was airborne as soon as the evidence was out. Overall I think at least here in the UK the system worked very well, health services were severely tested but the lockdowns were effective, and now the vaccines and other proven therapies have returned life pretty much to normal.
As for the WHO, they’re a weak politically compromised organisation that was all over the map in their covid response. Being a political football is by design though, as a UN agency. The governments that hold power over it want to be able to kick it around and they do.
Even so, they are also an incredibly important resource for dozens of developing countries that heavily rely on their technical expertise and resources. IMHO the answer is to strengthen them and make them more independent and capable of fending off political pressure, but unfortunately their (frankly deserved) credibility hit probably makes that impossible, so they’ll become even more bent out of shape by interference. We do need a credible, well resourced, at least somewhat independent global health organisation though.
You're quite right we should have locked down a few weeks earlier in the first phases. What I'm saying is the lockdowns and mask mandates worked. You're saying we needed more aggressive lockdowns and more masks, and I won't argue with you, yes. We could have done with even more of these measures, but the measures clearly did what they were supposed to do.
That's just saying we needed more of the system not that the system failed in the way I think OP meant. If anything Germany's success was because they were even more tightly integrated into the system.
A lot of people who looked into COVID were saying this doesn't add up. They were were framed to be in the 'small vocal minorities that say all sorts of crap'.
"the system" was all pointing and looking at each other. Big tech censored content that was deemed misinformation by the standards du jour.
"the system" failed what it said it would do, follow the science. And the WHO has been a major part of that system.
This statement applies to the WHO, and it applies equally to China, which will wear the shame of COVID for centuries. If China had been forthcoming from the start of the pandemic instead of obfuscating and frustrating every single attempt by the rest of the world to ascertain COVID's existence, its nature, and the risk it posed, China's role as COVID's origin would have been merely a footnote relegated to the introductory paragraph of all future histories written on the subject. Now, though, China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years. On top of that, the Chinese are so incompetent that the truth got out anyway. Great job, Xi.
I don't think "China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years" because that's not even what anyone remembers them as today, outside the US. And even in the US I don't think that's going to matter or create any semblence of a legacy in any way that matters. China was very quick to rebound from the economic downturn and as far as I can tell came out ahead of everyone else.
Not to mention that every single other country fucked up their pandemic response so badly that getting angry at China requires several layers of indirection (though some US media has been better at making this detour).
News about an "unknown decease" was right there on TV even as early as December 31[1]. On the same day, the news was already reported world-wide[2].
Later on, Western reporting said that China "lied about transmissibility" (i.e. that China said it was "not transmissible"), but what they actually said was that "evidence of transmissibility was not clear (at that moment)" — when knowledge of the virus was only a few weeks old and when Covid was nowhere near as transmissible as it is now.
Then later on, stories about "cover-ups" appeared, mostly referring to Li Wenliang, but these are complete misrepresentations.
- Li Wenliang was not a "whistleblower", his social media posts merely leaked through his contacts. And Li Wenliang's post was posted on Deccember 30, but literally the next day the case was already escalated to WHO[3].
- Li Wenliang also wasn't the first doctor who discovered something was wrong: dr Zhang Jixian was, who discovered the case many days before Li's actions. It was dr Zhang who worked on the process of escalating to China's national CDC and to the WHO.[4]
- Li Wenliang was never arrested, jailed or punished. The police merely reprimanded him. He had to sign an NDA promising not to spread rumors (the rumor being that "it was SARS", when it wasn't SARS and nobody knew what it was). That's it. He wasn't detained, he could go on working right after.
- Later on, the judge judged in favor of Li Wenliang, ruling that the police's behavior was unacceptable. The police then apologized.[5]
There were also stories about how China "infected the world" by deliberately allowing international flights from Wuhan — except China didn't do that, all flights from Wuhan were cancelled with the exception of diplomatic expatriation flights.
When I arrived back in the Netherlands by February 1, Wuhan had already been locked down for a week. And what did the western world do? They pretended like the virus would stay in China. Nobody took any measures to prepare for COVID. Nobody on the airport asked for my contact details. I called the Dutch CDC but there was no way to get tested, not even if I pay for it myself.
Meanwhile the media was full of stories about how "lockdowns are human rights violations", that "it's just a flu" and that "free press would have prevented this strategy". There were no "China was not forthcoming" stories back then — only stories gleeing about how big of a disaster China was. Only after it was apparent that it wasn't just a flu did the "China didn't warn us" stories began.
After it was apparently that the western "free press" failed to prevent the epidemic from spreading to their own territories (even with China's super-obvious warning of locking down Wuhan), did they take responsibility for the fact that they blamed it on China's "lack of free press" (even though China's press did report)? Of course not, they just swept that narrative under a carpet.
Then a year later, Delta appeared in India. Did anybody criticize India for not having stopped Delta despite already knowing about COVID for a year? Of course not: only if it happened in China does it deserve criticism. That China actually did report? Not important, we'll just keep pretending they didn't.
The problem isn't that "China wasn't forthcoming", the problem is that the west does not treat China fairly and has a tendency to scapegoat China. "China wasn't forthcoming" is merely an excuse to cover up the west's own failures and to stick to old prejudices about how China is a hellhole that can never do anything right.
I didn't use to care all that much about western reporting on China, but being on the ground in China during the early days of COVID opened my eyes and incensed me. It made me so angry to see all the lies in the media. It shocked me how ridiculously different reality was from western reporting.
What's more shocking to me was that I discovered that during the 25 years in the Netherlands, western media had effectively been lying to me about China the whole time. The false reporting about COVID was not a one-off fluke: I discovered that western media had always behaved that way (with other China-related topics), and will continue to behave that way. So if anyone wonders why I say things that sound like a "paid shill" (just to get ahead of the inevitable accusations just because I have a different opinion about China): this is why.
[1] http://tv.cctv.com/v/v1/VIDEZAj6WeYo0NLoxitYHgAd191231.html?...
[2] https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1YZ0GP
[3] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...
[4] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-charges-a...
[5] https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2044252365/politie-wuhan-doo...
Let me be clear: I don't think that China purposely infected anybody, or intentionally let the virus spread. As for the lab leak theory, it's plausible, but I don't think we'll ever know (thanks to the CCP), and the fact is it doesn't matter now.
What I do think is that the CCP, and the local Wuhan CCP officials in particular, tried to cover their own asses. That may have included literally keeping information from Poobear and the other top CCP brass, but the point is that I don't think it was intentionally bioterrorism so much as the CCP hierarchy utterly failing to look after its local population and that of wider China, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
Nor does one need to be a Trump fan (I'm certainly not and I don't even live in America) to think that this was wholly China's fault, or to think that China is still to this day lying and covering it up.
China isn't so much blamed for failing to 'stop COVID' as much as it is blamed for blatantly lying to the international community, misleading WHO officials (the very officials China planted there - look it up), continuing to mislead and deceive the international community and investigators, and just generally being abhorrent outside of COVID. See: China's pathetic response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's failure to even condemn it in mild terms; China's posturing with its military in the South China Sea and in territorial waters off Australia's coast, neither of which are places where China has legitimate claims to territory; China's behaviour in Hong Kong, which represent more lies (this time, lies directed towards England back in the '90s).
In short, the rest of the world thinks China - and particularly the China of the CCP - is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, arrogant shithole that lies to its citizens, firewalls them off from the rest of the world, and generally does whatever China thinks is in China's best interest, with no regard to principles or moral underpinnings. This is the place where asbestos is still widely used in construction, after all. It's also curious that global pandemics going back to the Black Death all seem to emanate from China. And before you say it, lots of places have/have had very high population densities without sprouting global diseases every few centuries, and of course the CCP knew this would be the reaction - which is why they covered it up. Maybe the Chinese should just stop eating bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens? But I digress.
In short, China is a morally bankrupt country that lies to its citizens and to the rest of the world, and seems to be increasingly aggressive militarily. COVID just happened to be the confluence of all those factors into something that fucked the rest of the globe over. And let me be clear: one could just as easily call America a morally bankrupt shithole, too, and they'd be right - but the fact is, America's moral bankruptcy has resulted in local wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American incompetence has never fucked the entire world over like China just did.
And let's be clear: If a virus broke out in India and the Modi government sat on it, obfuscated it, gagged local doctors, refused to allow media to report on it etc., there'd be just as much condemnation towards India as there was/is towards China. The reason China gets so much hate is because it is a dishonest bully whose modern rise rests on how well it has stolen Western intellectual property over the past 30 years, and not because the rest of the world has something against the Chinese specifically. China is called bad because it's bad.
But I strongly disagree with the notions that:
1. They "covered it up".
2. COVID is "wholly China's fault".
3. China is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, morally bankrupt country.
4. China lies and will continue to lie and cannot be trusted on anything.
5. The entire system is wholly corrupt, beyond saving, and deserves to be condemn in full.
6. China is militaristically aggressive and that "the rest of the world" sees China that way.
These notions are not based on facts. In fact, I assert that they are based on misrepresentations (i.e. anti-China propaganda), prejudice (one already believed that China is bad, so one is inclined to believe stories/rumors that confirm this regardless of their truth), ignorance (the "rest of the world" is bigger than the west), and sinophobia (fear of the Other; applying a different and unrealistic standard on China).
By and large, the Chinese population does not think that way about China at all. A 14-year long study by Harvard has found that 93% of Chinese are satisfied with the central government.[1] A later study, this time by York University, has found that satisfaction has gone up to a staggering 98%.[2] Neither of them used Chinese government data. All my family, both in the Netherlands as well as in China, are pretty satisfied with China even if everybody acknowledges there are problems (and which place don't have problems?). How can this be possible in a "shithole" that suppresses and abuses its citizen? The answer: China isn't a "shithole", nor are its citizens "supressed and abused". My Chinese wife is puzzled: "why do foreigners think China is hell?" China is just a country that does things differently and that has its own strengths and problems. Tendencies to project that beyond what it is, and into a world-threatening hellhole, is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
To those wondering what I say what I say: I recognize that China has problems and shortcomings. It would be foolish to deny that (and indeed, those who deny that are ultranationalists, that I do not approve). But when you condemn China's system wholesale, that's where you lose my support, and that's where you push me to the other side.
[1] https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350140842_Chinese_C...
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Regarding sinophobia, let's just say that I find these excerpts from your posts... highly curious, if not dishonest.
> It's also curious that global pandemics going back to the Black Death all seem to emanate from China.
Wait a minute, so this is not just about CCP?
Also: China has always had a huge population, so even based on simple probability there's a lot of things that come out of China.
> Maybe the Chinese should just stop eating bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens?
Oh so this is again not just about the CCP?
And let me tell you that by and large Chinese don't eat "bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens". But with so many people there's always a village somewhere with such practice.
Also don't forget that hygiene is something that develops over time as a country becomes more developed. China was comparable to Africa just a few decades ago. This low level of development was caused by imperalism so I find it highly disingenuous to accuse China of low hygiene.
You wonder why I'm not anti-CCP? 30 years ago when I left China, my hometown was a big mud pool with dirty streets and run-down buildings. We just came out of a period with insufficient food. Nobody owned a car, few people owned a TV or phone. Everybody had to work their ass off. In 30 years, all of that has changed. This is literally the best 30 years in the past 3000 years, and it's thanks to the cooperation between the citizens and government — neither could have achieved this in vacuum. The dirty markets of my childhood are mostly gone and overall hygiene has become much better.
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Regarding the 6 points I listed above, I'll address that separately in a separate comment.
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Re point 1: you keep saying they "covered it up" but based on what evidence? The first doctor who discovered it, Zhang Jixian, diagnosed an unknown pneunomia on Dec 27. By Dec 31 the case had been escalated to WHO. Where is the room for "covering up"?
Yes Wuhan officials probably were incentivized to not raise a big fuss until more about the virus is known. They probably erred too much on the optimistic side. But being too optimistic in the face of an unknown virus is still a far cry from "covering up" which would mean intend to lie in the face of clear evidence. Where is your evidence that that's what happened?
Where is the "misleading WHO"? The only thing I could think of was that tweet from the WHO saying that they "found no clear evidence of transmission", but that's not at all the same as "it's not transmissible". Now one would be correct in saying that that's too vaguely worded. So literally the next day they clarified that "transmission is still possible"[1].
Thus, I conclude that continued assertions that "they covered it up" is based on prejudice and the tendency to blame China, not based on actual facts.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/15/china-says-it-s-possible...
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Re point 2: why is COVID "wholly China's fault" when western countries failed to take precautions even 1 month after the Wuhan lockdown? 1 month after Wuhan I remembered that Alglophone media still called it "a flu", and that the Dutch prime minister didn't take the issue seriously at all. Yeah just wash your hands and sneeze in your elbow, no need for further precautions. A week later he had to eat his own words. How is this China's fault? Is locking down a megacity not enough of a warning?
This also brings us back to point 1. We can now say that Wuhan officials were wrong to have been too optimistic. But by the time Wuhan locked down, it should have been safe to say that one must err on the side of caution instead. But western countries didn't do that: they were still too optimistic. Why is Wuhan officials — who had little knowledge of the virus — being optimistic, a sign of a wholly corrupt regime that's 100% to blame for COVID, while western countries who were too optimistic despite massive warning not wholly corrupt and blameable?
I assert that this double standard is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
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Re point 4 and 5: where are the lies? What exactly did they lie about? You keep saying that they lie but where is the evidence? Why are you so convinced that they must lie even in the absence of such evidence? The Chinese public certainly doesn't think that the whole system and whole regime systematically lies (corruption here and there exist, as with anywhere else in the world).
In the absence of evidence about lying, I assert that the iron-clad belief that they must lie is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
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Re point 6: "military aggression" is propaganda, not based on facts.
China hasn't shot a bullet over its borders in 40 years. China still has border disputes, but those disputes are neither recent, nor did they arise out of military aggressiveness, nor are they purely a China problem.
All desputes are a legacy of the colonial period when the British drew lines all over Asia that neighboring countries later didn't agree on. All disputes that the People's Republic has and had, were inherited in 1949 from its predecessor state — none of the disputes are recent.
All land border issues, with the exception of India, have been resolved. The Indian dispute hasn't been resolved not because China is aggressive: in late 80s, China offered a very common-sense diplomatic solution, namely turning the status quo (territories that are de-facto controlled by each party) into official territory. India said no because they promised their public that all territory belonged to them.[2]
W.r.t. China's response to Russia: this is not a case of "the world unites against Russia and only China fails to condemn Russia, therefore China is complicit", as the media wants to paint. Pretty much only the west and its traditional allies like Japan, have voted in the UN to condemn Russia. Many other countries besides China have abstained, including India, most of the ASEAN countries, and many African states.[3][4] To single out China as being a sole "Russia enabler" is pretty disingenuous. But I will also add that I don't know all that much about Russia or China-Russia relationships so this is all I will say about this matter.
The South China Sea dispute is not a case of "China is aggressive against all other countries in the region and all others are asking for help against China". It's a case of "everybody in that region has disputes with everybody else". Vietnam and Taiwan have disputes with each other[5]. Vietnam and and Malaysia have disputes with each other[7].
China started building islands as a response to US military aggression (Pivot to Asia). China didn't want to do this and offered to deescalated together with the US, US said no, so China said "have it your way". Vietnam has been bulding islands in the SCS since the late 70s[6], so China is pretty late to that game.
It's definitely not a case of "countries unite against Chinese aggression". When AUKUS was formed, Malaysia expressed grave concern about AUKUS, going as far as planning consultations with China[8]. Singapore started holding navy drills with China[9]. ASEAN countries upgraded strategic ties with China.[10]
The 2022 ASEAN-US summit was postponed indefinitely.[11] There is indeed military aggression in that area, but it's not China. The US tried painting China as an aggressor, not only in SCS but also re Russia. But ASEAN countries don't see it that way, and re Russia they perceive China as neutral.
One thing I've learned in the past 2 years following geopolitics is that when people say "the world" or "the international community", they mean "the west and its allies like Japan". If you actually look at the world map and see what countries outside that clique think, you get a very different picture.
[2] Asian Peace Talks with Kishore Mahbubani E6: India's Relations with China and Pakistan: interview with Professor Kanti Bajpai, the foremost expert on India-China-Pakistan relations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoR0nQjvnkU&t=21m30s (21:30)
[3] Signatories to UN letter criticizing Russia's invasion of Ukraine: https://www.axios.com/un-security-council-vote-condemn-russi...
[4] Why African Countries Had Different Views on the UNGA Ukraine Resolution, and Why This Matters: https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-african-countries-had-diff...
[5] https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/vietnam-asks-taiwan-to-sto...
[6] https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3156306/south-c...
[7] https://www.voanews.com/a/east-asia-pacific_how-vietnam-mala...
[8] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3149713/mal...
[9] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1234992.shtml
[10] https://www.france24.com/en/video/20211028-asean-summit-sout...
[11] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/25/bidens-summit-with-...
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In conclusion, I still assert that the notion that China is a militaristic hellhole that abuses its own citizens, is not based on fact, but on misrepresentations (i.e. anti-China propaganda), prejudice (one already believed that China is bad, so one is inclined to believe stories/rumors that confirm this regardless of their truth), ignorance (the "rest of the world" is bigger than the west), and sinophobia (fear of the Other; applying a different and unrealistic standard on China).
Yup, I had a chance to be involved in some high profile (for the company) PR issues and one of the worse things you can do is trying to cover something up. It's far better to just be transparent and admitting errors can actually build trust if done right.
But I also understand that without solid evidence, it can be impossible to give firm recommendations, which in the end can make people question the value of what you say.
Getting PR right is actually really hard.
Maybe that's how you think, but lots of people don't think that way. To a large part of the masses, experts have to be right the first time around, otherwise people lose trust in them. Many people don't understand the scientific method or that science is not about certainty but about constantly learning and adjusting. Many treat science and expertise as authoritative, and when they fail, or even if they say "we don't know", many lost faith in the entire concept of science, jumping to... less science-y approaches that feel more emotionally gratifying.
Is this just a failure of education? I don't know.
The idea is that science should be continuous discovery process - scientists are meant to be acting in good faith, not hiding or 'managing' information. If we are genuinely seeking understanding (not attempting to sell people on a particular viewpoint), why shouldn't new information be widely disseminated?
Whatever has been going on, it is clear that from the start this has been a massively politicised process directing the world's governments. That it is so politicised means that I personally have very little faith in the scientific proclamations that are handed down.
And that’s why things get politicised in the first place.
This is the Fauci argument. It doesn't work.
Aside from being incredibly Condescending to assume the masses are too stupid to handle the truth...
All it does is open you up to criticism from people that understand basic logic.
Those criticisms then spread between these "many people".
On the other hand, if you told the truth up front, you might have "many people" misunderstand something, but you have the upside of the many other people being able to argue why they're wrong over the following months. Eventually truth and facts prevail.
You maintain credibility with people that do understand science, and you get eventual credibility from those who misunderstand.
Sure some will never change but you were going to instantly lose credibility to them either way.
This doesn't mean that I condone lying about being wrong. But it also doesn't mean that it's as easy as admitting mistakes.
Neither here nor there. Fauci, along with most governments in the oecd lied about mask efficacy to protect mask stocks for health care workers.
This was done because they didn't trust the poor stupid people with the truth.
All they had to say, masks work but please leave these for health care workers as they are more at risk. Most people would have done the right thing if they just trusted them, and if not? Who cares, it's not your fucking job.
> This doesn't mean that I condone lying about being wrong. But it also doesn't mean that it's as easy as admitting mistakes.
Except it is?
You need to trust humanity to make the right decisions when given the facts.
Hiding the facts, lying, or obscuring the truth in hopes of controlling the poor stupid people is how you get a nanny state.
Let idiots win the Darwin award and move on with your life.
Covid was more of a public health blunder than a medical one. Not having a cohesive strategy, conflicting and often political messaging around gatherings, and worst of all lying to people repeatedly bc they couldn’t “handle” the truth is insane. On top of that there was and still are plenty of plans for locking down etc that have no actual metrics around them. They’re literally just feeling based.
At least the medical companies came up with a good enough vaccine to get us out of this mess.
It really feels like the public health officials and politicians to some extent view the public with contempt.
Fault as in: someone should pay for it.
Definitely NOT a “honest mistake”
The WHO is doing damage control.
Also it seem that institutions are deemed to feel, just how I used to hear "religions are good but religious institutions are bad", it seem to start to apply to science now.
It was disgusting how rabid were liberals about the whole Covid thing.
That said, I'm willing to forgive anyone who's been living that way and realizes it's not gonna make for a particularly joyous human life. We're human, we get scared, we make mistakes.
Only in the rest of the world. In the US that word was redefined to mean "people I do not like" and they use "libertarian" instead for the original meaning.
The only sort of play that is obviously not tolerated is culture-jamming against the libertines. It's stupid, immature, in poor taste, morally reprehensible, selfish, deplorable, hypocritical, bigoted, alarmist, disingenuous, and sinful against the only commandment: "Do as thou wilt". This is our dungeon, in our fort, in what used to be your country. Go play somewhere else, and make sure we can't hear you.
Did they actually have a consensus for their conclusions, or were there just some segment of the site saying one thing, some segment saying another thing, and we now remember only the segment that was saying the right thing?
- A person's bodily autonomy is the most fundamental freedom there is. Of course there is a balance to be weighed when it affects others, but there is no absolute right or wrong answer.
- People absolutely are justified and right to question authority, politicians, self-proclaimed experts, pharmaceutical and medical corporations, as well as studies, data, and science.
- Even if "the science" around the risk of covid and benefit of lockdowns was correct, the response to it is not scientific. Policy can take science or evidence into account, that doesn't mean it is science. You are not anti-science if you don't believe mandatory lockdowns and economic shutdowns was a good policy.
As if clothes weren’t already a requirement for visiting your public venue of choice.
Go on then, tell us why you feel a mask is an infringement on your bodily autonomy but pants shirt shoes aren’t.
Turns out if you state virtually every possible conclusion, some of them will be accurate in the end
Yeah, I mean, who would have thought that the globohomo cabal was behind it all along... oh you mean that they were more accurate on the 10% non crazy stuff they say?
Experts are pinning their credibility on the line - not even if they issue every guess under a giant glowing banner saying "THIS IS JUST A GUESS WE DO NOT HAVE THE DATA TO BE DEFINITIVE YET". So: they're slower. I am not, incidentally, saying WHO's response is perfect.
“George Soros”
“Bill Gates”
Etc
Where's the bug tracker for humanity?
They start asking, what else have they been hiding and lying about. After that it's hard to keep it grounded in reality. It's the proverbial "and see how deep the rabbit hole goes".