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.
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).