The WHO is a useless organization. For political reasons, it will be necessary to engage, but hopefully US authorities will not treat it as an information source.
The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it.
But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examined yourself.
There is no winning with you... Of course it cannot be too powerful, because then nationalists would scream bloody murder and refuse to have anything to do with it.
The WHO is a forum to coordinate strategy and exchange information. Obviously, this requires a minimum of good faith, which seems to be difficult for some countries (yes, particularly dictatorships). But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.
So yes, China will lie, which will make life worse for epidemiologists and governments across the globe, but not as worse as it could be with China being entirely uncooperative.
It is not the world police, and it won’t come anywhere and do anything against the local government’s wishes. Otherwise the screams world be even louder, and justifiably so.
I don't think anyone wants the WHO to be powerful. They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't. But that isn't the WHO's fault or anyone working there. It's a property of what the WHO is.
They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China.
If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.
You have a much more charitable view of those in government then I do.
The motivation you suggest may apply to some people, sometimes, in some places but certainly not all people in all governments much and perhaps even most of the time.
Self interest, corruption, the desire for power, the desire for conquest and theft and a complete disregard for their citizenry and indeed humanity in general are unfortunately all too common with those who get into the governance business.
I feel ya. I'm in a life phase where I have to believe most people are just trying to do a good job most of the time. The alternative is too bleak. Michael Lewis' The Fifth Risk most closely captures my current thinking. My TLDR: Strive to create systems and orgs which will increase likelihood of good outcomes. Peace.
> They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies.
Their problem is not that their data is bad. Their problem is that they are acting like a political entity when they are supposed to be an impartial, data driven, scientific organization. For example, the WHO railed against common sense risk mitigation strategies such as travel restrictions (i.e. isolate China) early on with COVID when they were precisely what was needed to reduce risk. They did so for political or monetary reasons (closing borders harms economies). Xi latched on to this and used it as justification to keep borders open. Unsurprisingly, COVID subsequently spread rapidly between China and countries that had maintained open borders with China.
It is not the WHO's job to consider the economic ramifications of their policy suggestions: that is the job of politicians. It is their job to put forward suggestions for how to limit the spread of disease regardless of the impact to economies or governments.
If they are "working with what they have", then they should not speak from a position of authority.
Authority is derived from something being something that everyone has. In the past, achieving that goal practically guaranteed authenticity to within a comfortable enough quanta for everyone to work with.
With more advanced remote sensing equipment, the decreased cost to publish, reach one can attain for relatively little cost nowadays, that is no longer a luxury we can all afford to continue to entertain. We must all see with our own eyes. In the case that is frustrated or made impossible, it should not a surprise that the world acts as badly as it does.
This is why the collective lie is the most powerful weapon fielded by modern civilization, and why there is such a jockeying for control of what the definition of allowable evidence is. Perception management is a weapon of mass destruction, and should be called out for what it is.
That's actually a fairly hard question I haven't completely been able to find a way out of that doesn't lead to SSDD.
On the one hand, there's a part of me that imagines a world of completely neutral sensor grids that absolutely everyone is able to tap into for reading from, no questions asked, no restrictions. Anyone can see anything, from anywhere, period.
Imagine this was set up and anyone who knew how to insert state into the system just got disapoofed.
So you now have a reality where we're all capable of receiving the exact same information, and operatinng on it as we desire. The Executive decision of free will literally becomes what or where to pay attention to or where to invest your effort.
However, this ideal setup wouldn't last 15 minutes before nodes started to organize into meta-blocks devoting their cycles to getting other undecided nodes to devote their cycles where the meta-group thinks that attention is best directed. This creates information asymmetry, which enables perception management. To hell with mentioning or lining out for the Undirected that there are alternatives or an opportunity cost.
So even in the most ideal case where all the hard work is done to make it so everyone, everywhere can magically remote sense the same data, I can't architectually guarantee a proof against perception management.
Let us now shift to the opposite side of the spectrum.
You only have your own eyes, and your only means of long range remote sensing is by dedicating other people to head over there and collect it, and report back. Magically assume everyone is okay with these individuals doing so with no strings attached. (That never happens, but lets's assume). Also assume these people are selfless and amazingly perfectly rerceptive with a talent for getting across aspects of what they see.
You end up at the same problem. The hand that sets the bounds or priorities of those people collecting information represents the true seat of power, and de facto perception management. In a centralized system, you'd confer godlike power over the lower rungs to the people at the top.
The only way I can see it working out in some modicum of a better way is to ensure distributed sourcing of prioritization decisions. I.e. localized populations of these metaphorical informational go getters, with priorities set as some function arrived at by the consuming population.
Then again, you run into the problem of our current media/press edifice: the audience picks the facts by collective editorial discretion, and furthermore, you emergently get meta-nodes that pop up and rate authoritativeness by how often similar renderings of the same inputs pop up. Those meta-nodes, and the consumers of information feed into an overall balancing act. The meta-nodes try to build audiences by tailoring the facts they provide for maximized odds of acceptance by their influenced audience.
So in no way do I find any way to reconcile a system that includes authoritative weighting that results in a low probability of perceptual management arising. It's an emergent property of any network medium of information propagation.
This suggests, given it's inevitability of arising, we need to thoughtfully structure something around, enshrining information propagation as a first order infrastructure (which we kind of already have), but also relegating some form of negative outcome to poor performance as a neutral information propagator, which again, we already have. People are starting to distrust media outlets and other authoritative sources due to the bad information received, just as Nation's are apparently placing the WHO's credibility at arms length due to their proven unwillingness to research theories that reflect poorly on their subject.
So yeah. We got what we've got, and with a blank slate we'll end up in the same place even with a massive change to the fundamental architecture of human social consciousness.
It seems to stem from some some deeper intrinsic instinctual underpinning of successful life forms that I"m not really good at imagining outside of.
A lot of words to say I don't know I guess, but I gave it the good old college try.
>But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.
I tend to agree with this sentiment, however I'm always on the fence as to if acting on no new information is better than acting on false or misleading information. If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless. Anyways, that's for self reported information. Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
> I'm always on the fence as to if acting on no new information is better than acting on false or misleading information.
Yeah, neither is good.
> If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless.
It’s worse than worthless, because you are expecting disinformation. Though to be fair you can also get disinformation from sources you trust...
> Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
That’s why it’s good to have inspectors. But even then, there are limits. Inspectors usually cannot go anywhere they please (otherwise nobody would sign that treaty), so it’s always possible to hide things from them.
Our governments have also the right to be critical when reading reports, particularly based on data from untrustworthy countries. We elect them to do their job, and that job involves quite a bit of critical thinking when dealing with other countries. They also have experts and often scientific cooperation agreements that can complement the WHO.
So yes, the WHO is imperfect. Perfecting it is quite difficult without causing countries to drop out, and countries should not be reliant on only one source anyway.
The problem is that the WHO appears to have more legitimacy and authority than they do. I have no problem with the WHO existing and doing their job but we have to accept they are bound by international politics. In developed countries we should rely on local medical bodies first.
That is definitely a problem; it tends to be seen either as the saviour of humanity or as a globalist evil. It is not perfect and not a substitute for proper public health policies.
WHO does seem like a bureaucratic mess, though. I read their situation reports from the beginning of the pandemic, and was surprised by how often they messed up. Links were wrong, random files went down, and they were released at seemingly random time points. Their press conferences were often hours late. And Tedros Adhanom praised China to an honestly embarrassing extent.
Before the pandemic, I thought the WHO was a relatively capable organization. But from what I witnessed they just seem like a prestige farm used as a stepping stone to more lucrative careers.
The WHO has shown itself to be practically useless. The premise that sovereign nations need the WHO to cooperate is false. Diplomacy and cooperation between nations was the norm for many years prior to the WHO and will be the norm for many years after the WHO’s inevitable abandonment and demise.
Do you have a concrete example of public health cooperation amongst more than 2 nations before WWII? As far as I remember, every country just covered its metaphorical arse during the Spanish Flu pandemic, for example.
Of course, cooperation is always possible, but what would be the extent of cooperation between say China, Russia, and the US if a new treaty were signed today?
Sure, if data from US would be enough to understand and fight disease. Otherwise, you need to create some sort of world health organization to share meaningful data and investigate inside all country participant without the appearance of [or actual] invasion of sovereignty.
Thus, we have the WHO. You wanna replace it, it's gonna take a decade to get to another agreement if one even is made. Then it will have its own set of issues. During a pandemic, seems better to me to work with and hold accountable the one we have... kinda like the WH is doing today.
We don't need it for this. Intelligence organizations know that biological threats like this are intelligence problems. They just didn't think them likely or that the sick guy would be our enemy.
However, now we know the adversary is truly an adversary. China will suppress information on pandemics started within its borders.
The game has changed. You don't listen to China about whether China is sick. You listen to Keyhole and your guys on the ground.
The WHO needs to be credible and trustworthy as an impartial source of truth otherwise it is not required.
Unfortunately this particular topic is heavily politically-loaded and CCP’s track record of handling the virus leads the common person to believe the WHO won’t receive the full information.
In this case the WHO’s hands seem tied. How are they supposed to fix that? (Genuine question, I would like the WHO to be able to fulfill its role well and serve the global public good)
Remember that time a high up WHO representative was asked about COVID in Taiwan and he faked the video call freezing and disconnected? Then remember when they got him back he was again asked about Taiwan and said they had already discussed China?
I remember thinking that the WHO wasn’t what it seemed. Just one small example of course.
This is a particularly generic bit of evidence, based on cynicism with a bit of directional truth about incentives. Do you have anything that draws this connection more directly?
Thanks. Site guidelines discourage comments like yours but I was definitely rapidly getting downvoted till you said something. Interesting stuff.
I don't think anything I said about the WHO is particularly controversial considering the last year and their disinformation campaign.
Anyway, bodies like the WHO can't be effective information sources because you get in trouble if a novel contagious disease started in your country. It has to lead to increased money flow to the diseased site at disease onset and decreased money flow to sites likely to risk creating novel disease.
That is, market pandemic bonds structured on a regional basis will probably yield a better indicator than the WHO.
You mean primary sources like the program that had US scientists embedded in Chinese laboratories that Trump dismantled in 2019?
Also, you clearly don’t understand what the WHO does and how critical it has been in the reduction and even eradication of disease spread across the world over decades.
Further, the WHO, much like most multilateral organizations is dependent on its member states for strength. When the most powerful member state voluntarily and unilaterally chose to disengage over the past half decade, it shouldn’t be surprised that the 2nd most powerful member state is calling the shots.
Okay, I'm happy to amend to "The WHO is useless for information on novel disease spread". That's what I intended anyway but clearly did not constrain the sentence correctly.
Yeah, I'm sure as a multilateral platform for cooperation on things that everyone wants done they're good.
But as an information source for novel epidemics, clearly we should use our spy sats.
How do we use our spy satellites for information about an epidemic?
I'm really struggling to understand what you're suggesting here. I'm aware there is a whole cottage industry of conspiracy theorists that point to satellite photos of busy parking lots outside hospitals in Hubei Province as evidence of earlier spread of Covid than has been officially acknowledged. But there's no way to distinguish a busy parking lot caused by a severe influenza outbreak (which existed prior to Covid in Hubei) and a novel pathogen.
If I remember rightly, the news articles about those US scientists embedded in Chinese laboratories eventually admitted about half-way in that they wouldn't have access to any more useful information on Covid-19 than the US already had. Which, of course, made the articles kind of pointless except as a way of stoking outrage amongst people who didn't care about little details like that.
Has the WHO really been that critical or are we ascribing successes to them that are really the result of business and technological innovation? At least in the recent decade or two, they seem to consistently be bad at their job and mired in politics. Even before the coronavirus there were issues like their failures in managing the Ebola outbreak (https://time.com/4123858/ebola-crisis-who-response-failure/).
I watched the WHO press briefings in about the first month.
If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time.
Taiwan, the country that arguably handled the virus best of all, did so well because they ignored the WHO and quickly closed their border, at the time when the WHO was insisting that countries do not restrict travel to/from China.
Mask early, serious lockdown as soon as it becomes serious, and don’t end lockdowns before numbers are way low. We masked late, put lockdowns in place late if at all, and ended them way too early, which means that some countries went through several ones. And we’re not through yet.
That said, I don’t share the optimism of the parent poster. This would be a heavy burden in terms of freedom and human rights for a result that is far from certain. There have been some resurgences, the extent of which is of course unknown because the truth would be damageable to China. And there is no knowing whether the next variant would start it all over again, in which it would be back to square one.
>> If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time.
Thank you for putting this stuff together. In the past, I did the same when people asked for "source?" for things like "Fauci and the HHS recommended against masking". After I go through the painful process of reacquiring each of the sources, these people disappear.
"Source?" is now the dual of the Gish Gallop strategy. It is a meta-rhetorical strategy to amplify work done by some perceived "opponent".
After all, for anyone who truly believes in sourced claims, they would say "I found these sources that do X. What have you found?" This is natural because they are more interested in the truth than in an argument against an "opponent".
So now I don't respond to disproportionate requests for work. I am glad you did, though. And looking through them, it's exactly as I remember: anti-mask advocacy.
I'll give credit to the WHO for not deleting their tweets. It would be even better if they offered a mea culpa explaining how they came to this position that was incorrect in hindsight. But not just disappearing things already is better than some others do.
Haha I mean the people disappear after firing off their "Source" calls. They're not really interested in sources. It's a technique to get you to waste your time.
Right, yes, that was early March. The guidelines evolved as more information became available and they released new advice in early April, which is far from ideal but better than a lot of governments reactions.
Their official stance before that was rigorous test, isolate, and trace, which was not done seriously anywhere outside China.
I was in China during the initial lockdown that started in late January/early February. The instructions from the government were clear from day one: stay home as much as possible, wear a mask when you go out, wash your hands when you get home, open your windows and keep your place well-ventilated. All that advice holds true today, just as it held true for SARS, MERS and other similar viruses.
I feel like the reporting from the WHO was deliberately sub-par for political reasons. For example the vacillating on masks - everyone knew that masks helped, but the WHO tried to be on the fence about it because some countries were experiencing shortages. Another example of the WHO playing politics was when they neglected to publish the advice not to trust folk remedies, since that would have gone against a Chinese government campaign to try softly promote TCM, perhaps as a form of psychological comfort to the hundreds of millions stuck in lockdown.
Living through corona has helped me to realize that successful public health policy isn't just about giving everyone the raw facts, it's also about managing people's morale and trying to influence their behavior through propaganda. I think the WHO tried to do this, but it wasn't universally successful.
There was a concerted effort from government officials,
bandwagon-joining academics (aided by journalists) in the West to downplay masking, and to ridicule and shame those who wore masks. Here is a Time article from eary March where it was described as the equivalent of “knocking on wood”. https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/
I am fairly certain that the US government reversed itself on masks before the WHO did (Wikipedia says WHO changed its advice in June).
Well, mask early may not have been the best choice of words then. Taiwan's reaction would qualify as early. And Taiwan is the thing that the WHO has been very conspicuously be silent about even when asked explicitly.
Most of those tweets were discouraging the use of masks for the purpose of protecting yourself from Covid. This still holds true today. At the time, a lot of people were hoarding masks, thinking it would protect themselves. Letting them continue wouldn't help control the spread, and probably would have increased the spread in hospitals.
I agree the fourth tweet has aged particularly terribly.
I’m not sure the federal government has the plenary power to enforce such things in the United States. So it was never an option. Authoritarian governments or single-state nations are better able to mandate behavior.
The lockdowns, even as implemented, extracted an enormous toll on small businesses and mental health.
> I’m not sure the federal government has the plenary power to enforce such things in the United States.
I am certain it hasn’t. But the same reasoning applies for state governments. Having public health decisions taken at the county level is sheer madness.
> The lockdowns, even as implemented, extracted an enormous toll on small businesses and mental health.
This is entirely true, and I hope this will make people and governments take health issues and depression more seriously. Now, we don’t have an alternative earth to experiment, but whether one strict lockdown for 6 months followed by progressive reopening is better or worse for people and the economy compared to a succession of waves and partial lockdowns with no end in sight should certainly be discussed.
This is even more skewed in countries that do not have a proper safety net and where people have the choice between going to work ill or not having a job.
I think it's more of a cultural difference rather than government one. Korea and Taiwan are democracies and managed to control the pandemic as well. The US government has the authority to declare martial law, but doing so would completely undermine people's faith in the government.
There is certainly a cultural element, but it is literally a legal difference as well. The federal government in the US does not have the same broad powers as the federal government in Korea. Remember the US is a collection of states that consented to let the feds take on certain powers while retaining many, whereas South Korea is “just” South Korea. Provincial autonomy in SK is not anything like the “state’s rights” issue in the US.
I am curious about this “pro-lockdown, pro-mask” advice from ethe WHO.
I am almost certain that they took a long time to recommend masking. I also am fairly confident that the WHO was/is opposed to lockdowns and it certainly still opposes travel restrictions.
> I am almost certain that they took a long time to recommend masking.
They did. Initially they recommended testing and isolating (which obviously could not scale much). Their guidelines were still happily ignored as they were updated, though.
I remember that at the time when we were masking up in the Czech Republic (first half of march, maybe..?), WHO was actually talking a lot about the dangers of face masks when used too eagerly and improperly. Or at least that was what had gotten through our mainstream media.
In much of the world, people who wore masks were subject to ridicule, especially on social media because of the cynical public health messaging, which seemed to be about preserving stocks of masks for healthcare workers by telling the public that “masks don’t work” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...).
The New York Times op-ed above, and efforts from the Czech Republic made discussing public masking more acceptable in the US, and then the rest of the world.
Re: masks, you need to remember that China pretty much shut down all exports of PPE to keep it for domestic use. There wasn’t much more the rest of the world could have done to follow that directive. Even those of us that did have some stockpiled were asked to donate them to hospitals. Masks were hard to come by for a while until a cottage industry popped up to create second-rate masks.
I am actually very unhappy about this. I knew that masks were reusable. The advice against reuse explains why they are reusable under the right conditions.
But then I gave away my N95 mask stockpile (years old¹) in a moment of weakness because local medical personnel appealed on the Internet. I regret it entirely because I didn't want to do it, had concrete rational reasons not to do it, and then I felt bad when they appealed and did it anyway.
I really regret the emotional hijack. I'll never let it happen again. I just know they used those masks once and threw them away. Or maybe they used them zero times because they couldn't tell if they're safe because they're from the public. I really really regret it.
¹ Because CA sees wildfires everyone I know has boxes of these. And old ones are not supposed to be used either, but the only common failure mode over ten years isn't filtration, it's the elastic, which was fine on mine.
The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it.
But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examined yourself.