The WHO has been spreading misinformation from the start, including claims that covid does not spread from human to human after it was abundantly clear that it does[0], claims that travel bans would be unnecessary to halt its spread[1], and claims that people should not wear masks[2].
These are not mere edge cases. We have structured our public organizations in a way that gives credentialed "experts" enormous amounts of power, but without making sure they are _actually good at what they do_. This move by youtube further enshrines credentials on top of the grave of competence. This is how you end up with the FDA banning covid tests for more than a month, how you end up with a completely ineffective CDC, or (to return to the topic at hand) the WHO spreading nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that the twitter shitposters I follow were far ahead of all the major health organizations on this topic, but if they mention covid in a tweet they'll get their account suspended now. This censorship is not about censoring bad info, it's about censoring any "non-official" info regardless of its veracity.
So far as I can tell, your extremely confident, categorical interpretations of your own citations are basically mistaken, across the board. As I read [0] it is not, in fact, a blanket declaration about transmissibility. As I read [1] it is not in any way an inaccurate statement (see [3]). When read [2] it's clear that it is not a blanket declaration not to wear masks.
Meanwhile Youtube is going to take down videos claiming 5g caused the coronavirus, which are obviously wrong and obviously causing harm. And instead of looking at cases of obvious misinformation the policy targets, you would rather we go down a rabbit hole of idiosyncratic disputes about the the meaning of WHO statements, all while keeping up blatantly inaccurate misinformation.
Tying ourselves up in that frivolous debate would let misinformation flourish.
Geeks, more than most, should be savvy about scientific progress.
Coronavirus is still very new. We're learning new things every day. eg Today it's risks from blood clots.
I'd only be worried if the experts (WHO, CDC) failed to update their position over time.
Aside: Retric's comment earlier about AIDS killing 770k every year reminded me how long it took to understand anything about HIV, much less cope. And all the senseless unnecessary misinformation and backlash which thwarted progress.
Is it appropriate to flag HN comments that are so blatantly wrong like the one you replied to? If YouTube is taking down misinformation, is HN doing the same?
There's an endless flood of these bad comments. I'm just going through them (a new one posted every 2 minutes) and making the same rebuttal. People are stupid -- especially people who think they're smart contrarians.
As I mentioned in a few posts elsewhere in this page, 4chan was a better source of information than the WHO back in January.
You might be in earnest, but you're behaving like a contrarian who thinks they know more than they do. "You have become the very thing you sought to destroy."
I've never seen anyone be consistent in their kneejerk cries of "but free speech!" They still want moderation, banning, and silencing, especially of their critics. They want ideas removed from the spotlight they don't agree with. They say that the moderation that every platform needs to thrive is a "slippery slope" while already sliding down it
> As I read [0] it is not, in fact, a blanket declaration about transmissibility.
It's still misinformation, and it's specifically misinformation that makes the WHO complicit in 187,420 deaths and counting. There had been plenty of indications by that point that - even if human-to-human transmission had not yet been confirmed - it was still evidently spreading beyond people at ground zero.
That is, I ain't sure how you're able to read it as anything but a blanket declaration. The WHO outright said that there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission; this is an outright lie, given that the sheer number of people by that point who were hospitalized with the virus without ever having visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market would be, I would argue, evidence.
> When read [2] it's clear that it is not a blanket declaration not to wear masks.
No, but it's advice that - if followed - would make any asymptomatic carrier dangerous. The point of wearing masks is not to prevent yourself from being infected (no mask is sufficient for that), but rather to minimize the risk of you spreading SARS-CoV-2 to other people by breathing on them.
The WHO seems to have a chronic pattern of being one or more weeks behind the curve on its assessment of COVID-19 and the mitigation thereof. Needless to say, I trust them about as far as I can throw them (which is 0 meters, given the impossibility of throwing an entire organization), and that YouTube is putting them on any kind of authoritative pedestal despite these blatant missteps is ignorant of that behavioral pattern.
> Oh yes, the random programmer who know public health better than actual public health experts.
Apparently yes, given that it's a bit of a smoking gun. Namely because:
> the Huanan Seafood Market was suspected as a source of the virus but it could have come from somewhere else too.
It was (to my knowledge) the only suspected source for quite a while (up until the later discovery that the currently-known "patient zero" had no connection to it, and even then it's still considered ground zero for the outbreak). If there was any indication that "it could have come from somewhere else", and that "somewhere else" is evidently a place where even fewer patients in common visited ("evidently" because if it was a common factor it would've been mentioned instead of or alongside the seafood market, and yet... no such location was mentioned), then that serves as even stronger evidence that it's somehow spreading between humans, even if the mechanism is unknown.
If even a "random programmer" on Hacker News can point this out, then I strongly suspect there were a number of doctors and nurses and other personnel on the front lines who could have and did point this out, too.
Plus, China knew as early as 31 December that the "novel coronavirus" was related to SARS (leaking that info is what got Dr. Li Wenliang in trouble), which was already known to spread human-to-human. Seems like "it looks like SARS and probably has similar spreading mechanisms" would be a reasonable assumption when information is limited: better safe than sorry (and in this case, 180,000+ deaths later, "sorry" indeed). I obviously don't blame the WHO for the entirety of that (or even necessarily China; my government dragged its feet, too, like most governments), but the WHO is certainly not blameless, either, and that it continues to spread misinformation like how not everyone should be wearing masks doesn't leave a whole lot of room for me to give them the benefit of the doubt.
>It was (to my knowledge) the only suspected source for quite a while
Yes, but the only suspect does not mean conclusive evidence.
>Plus, China knew as early as 31 December that the "novel coronavirus" was related to SARS (leaking that info is what got Dr. Li Wenliang in trouble),
This is untrue, Li Wenliang said it was SARS, and it's actually another virus. He did not know it was related to SARS but assumed it was SARS due to the symptoms.
edit: secondly he did not leak the information, he send it in a private chat to friends, one of whom leaked it.
> Yes, but the only suspect does not mean conclusive evidence.
That's... exactly my point. The evidence pointed in favor of human-to-human transmission specifically because there was no definitive common source.
> Li Wenliang said it was SARS
SARS-CoV-2 is literally a different strain of the virus that caused the original SARS (SARS-CoV; now called SARS-CoV-1). "It's SARS" is reasonably accurate (especially given the information available at the time), even if not quite specific; it's like calling Ebola, well, "Ebola" without knowing if it's specifically Zaire ebolavirus or Sudan ebolavirus or Reston ebolavirus or what have you. Regardless, if the public and Chinese authorities had treated it like how said authorities should've treated SARS two decades ago, the world would very likely be in a much better position than it is now. And likewise, if foreign governments (including my own) believed it to be SARS instead of just some weird flu, they might very well have restricted travel earlier and imposed stronger quarantines early instead of waiting until it was too late to be effective.
How you read them is irrelevant. What's relevant is that hundreds of thousands of people read the first one, took it at face value, and decided that the coronavirus is not a threat. The WHO definitely misled people with that first one, the only thing up for debate is whether it was deliberately or due to incompetent messaging.
GP comment is a bit too categorical but it's not even a contested fact that WHO initially downplayed the epidemic, put out recommendations to keep borders open, and still continues to spread disinformation e.g. about not needing to wear masks.
I won't even say anything about the string of corruption allegations and ties to China.
And then the fact that WHO basically pretended Taiwan doesn't exist[1] and is clearly aligned with Chinese political interests over even its primary mission.
Giving absolute authority over 'truth' to an entity with such a shitty track record is insane.
Can you explain how the WHO is given "absolute authority"?
The WHO has a list of medical guidance. I've yet to see anyone in this thread complain about any of the medical guidance the WHO has provided. The most relevant is likely this page: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2.... None of this is controversial.
> put out recommendations to keep borders open
This is incorrect. The WHO recommended against banning travel from certain parts of the world. Completely closing you borders (to non-citizens) was not covered. You can read the WHO's actual statement[1], and it's well reasoned. The value of unrestricted travel for emergency equipment and personnel outweighs the value of restricted travel from certain areas. But short term restrictions are alright if necessary to build up infrastructure (iow, to flatten the curve temporarily).
> about not needing to wear masks.
They recommend against random everyday people using medical masks. Given the PPE shortage, this is not unreasonable advice. They defer to local authorities for more stringent recommendations.
> And then the fact that WHO basically pretended Taiwan doesn't exist
> The WHO has been spreading misinformation from the start, including claims that covid does not spread from human to human
Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
They did say though that flying to China was still okay in as late as February. For what? Fear of CCP?
If this virus had come in some African country, they would have no problem in closing everything out - as anyone that understands tail risks would. But because it's China, then the recommendations for actions come after the evidence can not be hidden anymore. It is immoral.
No, that's wrong. WHO essentially never encourages travel restrictions, their whole philosophy is that open international collaboration is crucial (that's why the W stands for "world"!). At the height of the Ebola epidemic, they didn't call for travel restrictions to Africa either.
There are legitimate arguments that travel restrictions are counterproductive, so you should argue against those, not against some perceived double standard that doesn't actually exist.
The fact that WHO made the same claim and the fact that it's disputed by most actual experts around the world, hence ongoing travel restrictions, is a pretty good example of why there can't ever be one arbiter of 'truth' in a free society.
Do you see the asymetry here? It makes no sense to "argue" for travel restrictions after the genie is out of the bottle. There is no "going back" to a restricted state.
If they had started with the strong restrictions and then loosened it up after more information/debate/evidence of safety, then things would be better. But instead they let it go and claimed that "absence of evidence" is the same as "evidence of absence". Completely irresponsible. This is why the WHO's response to it is so infuriating.
There are constant new outbreaks, at the rate of several per year. (If you want to try to keep up, see here: https://promedmail.org/ ) The vast majority fizzle out, and for the rest, travel restrictions are not often useful or necessary. Recent examples of this include SARS, MERS, swine flu, Zika, several hemorrhagic fevers, and resurgences of diseases like measles and plague. If the WHO responded to all of these with a call for a global travel ban, travel would never be allowed.
> responded to all of these with a call for a global travel ban
No. There is no call for a "global travel ban". Are you deliberately misunderstanding what I am saying?
The call is (or better, it was, now is too late) for a restriction of mobility in the place of an outbreak, until they either "fizzle out" or are controlled/understood/resolved by development of treatment and/or vaccine.
If an outbreak is likely to "fizzle out", then the restriction will be for a short time and localized to the source and chances of spreading around the globe is reduced. And in case the outbreak is highly contagious like this one, an early and swift restriction would prevent the pandemic in the first place, or at the very least slow down things as much as possible to avoid exponential explosion of cases.
THAT IS THE KEY POINT! The WHO should be asking for an early local lockdown so that we wouldn't have to act later in a global one.
How many pandemics did we have since WHO was founded, not originated in China, with such speed of contagion and long incubation period which allows for infected people to get infected in one city and be on a plane to infect the other side of the world in less than 24 hours?
Hard to find a counterexample when n=0.
My "being rude" is due to the fact that the WHO's actions and directions have been mostly politics washed up in science instead of properly looking for guidance for the well-being of people. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
They should've asked for restrictions. They should tell people "wearing a mask may not help you, but not wearing is certainly worse, so go ahead and get masks." All we get instead is CYA and bureaucratic responses. They need to be held responsible for their part in this mess.
You could surely find recommendations (should they exist) for unilateral imposition of rules in relation to recent epidemics like Ebola. After all your argument above was:
If this virus had come in some African country, they would have no problem in closing everything out - as anyone that understands tail risks would. But because it's China, then the recommendations for actions come after the evidence can not be hidden anymore. It is immoral.
Now I agree the coronavirus situation is without precedent, but if you're going to make assertions that they would have done X here while only doing Y there, you need to back it up with some evidence for your claims about X.
So your objection to what I am saying is that I claim some double standard when there is no instance where they applied one of these standards? Is that it?
Ok, fine. Never mind the fact that this is also a mistake of conflating absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Your objection does not invalidate what I am saying regarding the biggest problem with the WHO: their failure in defending early action and in showing themselves to be a political-bureaucratic organization more preoccupied with its own existence than in achieving the goals it was supposed to.
Swine Flu originated in the US, right? Wouldn't that be another case of an outbreak starting in a country that is rich and powerful enough to make the WHO look the other way instead of doing its job to mitigate the risk of a pandemic?
Flying to non-Wuhan China in mid-February was about as okay as driving to the next town over in the US, in early-March. An incredible majority of cases were in Wuhan.
I would add that WHO requires nations to inform them of the measures they are intending to take so that WHO can do some coordination, and nations don’t tell them and WHO has to do catch up by reading the newspapers.
Yes, that's how I interpret 'no clear evidence from preliminary investigations'.
The relevant timeline: Li Wenliang (a doctor in Wuhan) blew the whistle on Dec 30. 4 days later he was harassed by the Chinese police for "spreading rumors". On Jan 8 Li Wenliang was infected. On Jan 12 he was put in the ICU. On Jan 14 WHO denied human-to-human transmission.
December 25: Wuhan Municipal Health Committee posted on social media, “An Urgent Notice on the Treatment of Pneumonia of Unknown Cause.”
December 31: China contacts WHO and informs them of “cases of pneumonia of unknown etymology detected in Wuhan.”
January 1: Huanan Seafood Market is closed.
January 3: China informs US CDC and other countries
January 10: The gene sequencing data of COVID-19 is posted online and shared with other researchers.
January 23: China goes into lockdown.
Taiwan, themselves, had a press conference where they showed the email they sent the WHO and it did not say human-to-human transmission.
> As there were no confirmed cases in Taiwan at the time, the [Taiwan] CDC could not definitively state that there had been human-to-human transmission of the disease, he added.
> “We would really be giving a misleading message if we firmly stated that there was human-to-human transmission, so we clearly alerted the IHR about the information we received,” he said.
Just regarding your first statement: isn't 'no evidence of X' entirely different than 'evidence of no X'? Seems to me they were saying the first, but you're interpreting it as the second?
The vast majority of laypeople (inclusive of people who would be getting their information from the WHO's Twitter account) would readily interpret "no evidence of X" to be equivalent to "we shouldn't be worried about X". To pretend otherwise betrays a misunderstanding of how laypeople think.
If the WHO had a more nuanced stance, they should've made that clear - e.g. "We don't have evidence yet that the #coronavirus spreads human-to-human, but it's possible".
But the thing is, that was their stance. I agree that their tweet might show a lack of scientific communication skills or scientific education of the general public, the official recommendations have been very clear. Countries and public health organisations don't base decisions on a tweet. They go to the official guidance.
"The primary objectives of surveillance are to:
1. Detect confirmed cases/clusters of nCoV infection and
any evidence of amplified or sustained human-to-human
transmission;"
Then on Jan 10th:
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/330374/WHO-...
"As information about the etiology, clinical manifestations and transmission of disease in the cluster of respiratory disease patients identified in Wuhan is limited, WHO continues to monitor developments and will revise these recommendations as necessary."
Neither of those directly say "it's possible that the novel coronavirus, like other coronaviruses, is capable of human-to-human transmission", with the sole exception (to your credit) of one quote buried in a header in that second document: "route of transmission unknown but suspected to be respiratory".
Also, those documents seem to be focused entirely on laboratory testing and surveillance, not on, you know, treatment or prevention (beyond one section on preventing infection among medical/laboratory personnel, whence I pulled that quote) or risk assessment.
If these are the documents used for policymaking, then it seems their lack of communication skills extends even here. They'd benefit from a more bottom-line-up-front approach and making these suspicions more explicit; the documents as they stand read as a wishy-washy "well we don't quite know how this spreads and don't want to jump to any conclusions...", and it should be entirely unsurprising that policymakers interpreted that as "aight, WHO hasn't said it spreads between humans so nothing to worry about".
>Yes, that's how I interpret 'no clear evidence from preliminary investigations'.
If that is true, then you are just categorically not competent to be making interpretations of scientific statements. In a separate comment you cited a handful of sources that, on my reading you had clearly not interpreted accurately, and now you're advancing an argument that depends on a fallacy so obvious that would be dispensed with by a JV debate team.
Yes Dr. Li contracted the virus on January 8 when he returned to the hospital in Wuhan where the first patients were identified in December 2019.
Dr. Li made social media posts about the virus which Chinese authorities forced him to take down and sign a written confession and promise not to do it again.
Now the question is do you have a source that shows the exact steps, if any, the WHO took to verify the “preliminary investigation” as reported by the Chinese authorities? Because from the sound of it, Chinese authorities reported these claims to WHO and WHO turned around and published the Chinese claims without performing any independent investigation (they certainly didn’t know about Dr. Li at the time).
This is a huge non sequitur from my question on "spread from human to human after it was _abundantly clear_ that it does"
But I will respond to your goalpost shift as well in defense of Li Wenliang who's a celebrated individual in China but turned into a cartoon meme in the west.
Li, an ophthalmologist, has no first hand knowledge of the virus nor was he trying to "whistleblow". He received a private group message within the hospital from ER department director and he simply re-shared the message to other private groups with his classmates.
The ER director, Ai Fen, was the source of the hypothesis that some patients in the hospital had, incorrectly, SARS and she was the right channel to escalate in the first place. And her escalation was successful when 1 nurse was observed to have been infected on January 11th.
The only piece of new information Li brought to the world was on January 30th when he tested positive.
-why did Chinese police get involved and force Dr. Li to remove social media posts about the virus and sick patients?
-who were the Chinese Authorities, by name, who represented their “preliminary investigation”
-what steps did WHO take to independently verify what they were told by Chinese Authorities about person to person transmission before posting this information to the public on Twitter?
Edit:
No offense but you seem like one of China’s paid trolls, throughout this thread you are accusing everyone who mentions facts of “moving the goal posts” and otherwise attacking “the West”. The West didn’t give the WHO knowingly false information and use their political power to have the WHO tweet the falsehoods to the public with #TheWest
'There is no clear evidence from the preliminary investigation' and 'the preliminary investigation finds that human-to-human transmission is not taking place' are two quite different propositions. The WHO opted for an excess of scientific caution - partly to avoid pissing off China, partly out of fears of being accused of alarmism, which have since been validated in spades.
Now while I agree that WHO is a poor yardstick of scientific truth, that is a long way from saying it's useless. With all its faults I prefer to the disinformation and quackery that are flying about, and indeed pouring out of the White House.
> There is no clear evidence from the preliminary investigation' and 'the preliminary investigation finds that human-to-human transmission is not taking place' are two quite different propositions.
Everyone understands the difference.
>The WHO opted for an excess of scientific caution
No scientific caution would have been independently verifying China’s representations and throughly reviewing their claims before retweeting it to the public.
The commenter who spawned the thread may have worded it that way, but the point is much bigger, the point is the WHO was responsible for spreading misinformation.
So even assuming the commenter worded it properly “no clear evidence” WHO tweet is still misinformation to the public because they Tweeted on 01/14/20 but as early as 12/30/19 China had evidence the virus was was being transmitted person to person in the Wuhan hospital, and on 01/08/20 the a Dr. had contracted it.
So we agree that not everyone understood the difference. The commenter who made that observation was right and you were wrong to brush it away. The loss of that distinction was the basis for at least one person in this thread to wrongly assert the WHO was spreading misinformation.
You can't dispute that, so you want to shift to a broader question. I think xster already answered the claims that you are repeating now, and your reply to xster was to expand the conversation even further with even more non-sequiturs and to suggest they were a paid troll.
This is the pattern that keeps repeating itself. Someone confidently declares the WHO is spreading misinformation for reasons that turn out to be inaccurate, but take lots of time to refute. And those efforts to focus on previously made statements are met with meandering replies constantly seeking to 'broaden' the conversation.
Stuff like this is what really annoys me with Hacker News, imagine a public health official reading programming recommendations, not understanding half and making declarations that it's misinformation.
You claim they claimed it does not spread from human to human, but the tweet talks about preliminary research. If you don't understand how science works, don't make such rash opinions on it.
These are not mere edge cases. We have structured our public organizations in a way that gives credentialed "experts" enormous amounts of power, but without making sure they are _actually good at what they do_. This move by youtube further enshrines credentials on top of the grave of competence. This is how you end up with the FDA banning covid tests for more than a month, how you end up with a completely ineffective CDC, or (to return to the topic at hand) the WHO spreading nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that the twitter shitposters I follow were far ahead of all the major health organizations on this topic, but if they mention covid in a tweet they'll get their account suspended now. This censorship is not about censoring bad info, it's about censoring any "non-official" info regardless of its veracity.
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUN7LIXUMAY_2DI.jpg
[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVCIDfoWAAc-mq0.jpg
[2]: https://www.who.int/images/default-source/health-topics/coro...