I just caught myself on the funny fact, that my level of trust for some stranger on HN is higher than the level of trust for WHO. They worked hard to ruin their reputation.
Wasn't that the most up-to-date data at the time? Are you claiming that they did find clear evidence and were lying about it, or that they somehow should have had evidence to the contrary at that time?
Just like any burgeoning subject, you should generally keep up with the expert recommendations. Expecting them to have had all the answers and get everything exactly right in a circumstance with as many unknowns as this pandemic has had is foolish. It's silly how many people are treating medical agencies like this as if they're complete amateurs because some of their educated guess have ended up not being ideal, or that they've updated their recommendations regularly based on recent data.
It seems like people are expecting medical organizations to be like politicians. Updating recommendations based on new data regularly isn't "double backing" or flip-flopping, it's updating recommendations based on new data. It does mean that sometimes their advice will not be correct, especially when the data is thin, but it's literally the best choice you have available.
I really expect a technical community to be better about this kind of stuff. Limited data means less reliable conclusions.
Can’t believe we still have to deal with this FUD.
No, China “hasn’t been arresting doctors”; in particular Li Wengliang was never arrested. He had “a talk”, similar to certain American YouTuber visited by NSA for not being patriotic enough.
The same thing happens with e.g. Fauci's mask remarks from March of 2020. Somehow people pretend like that was the fatal communication sin of the whole pandemic and the reason there's little trust in the medical community and they ignore the months and months of downplaying the virus and just an endless stream of disinformation from literally everyone else in the administration in service of trying to get reelected.
"Preliminary" is a key word, as is "clear". The clear evidence came (to the WHO, at least) about a week later. On the same day as the tweet, they provided further information that doesn't fit in a tweet indicating they expected things to potentially change:
> The timeline states that on that date, a WHO official noted in a press briefing that there "may have been" limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus between family members and that there was "a risk of a possible outbreak."
They very confidently ruled out the lab leak theory (while admitting that they know basically nothing else about the origin, except that it couldn't have been a lab leak), then had to backtrack on that.
This makes me suspicious of their current claim (that they know that "Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death." while at the same time claiming to know basically nothing else).
