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It's depressing to see rational voices saying they don't trust the WHO or tending to conspiratorial thoughts. The WHO has first-hand details about the pandemic

It's depressing to see rational voices saying they don't trust the WHO or tending to conspiratorial thoughts. The WHO has first-hand details about the pandemic and they update their views and adjust their recommendations accordingly even if we have the feeling they are acting slowly or back-and-forth (e.g. when there was a critical and global shortage of materials for masks to give to health workers and only months later started saying wearing masks was the ideal and people simply bought the "they changed their mind so they must have been wrong all the time" idea). Without WHO the world would effectively be a much worse place for a good chunk of the world population and many contagious diseases would be around right next to some rich nations's borders. If they say it's one big wave it's because this is what the current data and analysis suggest. Can it be seasonal after all? Nobody freaking knows, but this is the best line of thought we have so far so let's act accordingly and not let the guard down please.

zests 6y ago
A critical shortage of cloth? What's depressing is how politicized the virus has become. How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality. If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations then we really can't say anything at all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 6y ago
  > If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations You seem certain of this. Please post a link to the high quality evidence that you think WHO should have used to recommend mask wearing in the general public. This should be either a meta-analysis or RCT that shows a clear benefit. We have plenty of RCTs of masks to prevent spread of respiratory disease. It should be very easy to find one -- you're so certain you must have already read the research, and if the effect is so clear it'd be obvious to people doing the research.
- goodside 6y ago
  > A critical shortage of cloth? Not cloth, but melt-blown (and to some extent spun-bond) non-woven polypropylene. This is the fabric used to make surgical masks, surgical gowns, bouffant caps, and disposable bedding for hospitals. All of these things were in shortage in March and April. The shortage of melt-blown non-woven fabric itself is now mostly over. Still in shortage are N95 respirators, which use melt-blown electret non-wovens — material given an electrostatic charge so that it attracts particles in the air. International N95-equivalent respirators are available to the public at inflated prices, but genuine (American standard) N95 masks are still difficult to find at any price. The WHO guidance against mask-wearing was a desperate attempt to mitigate N95 shortages. Even when all major health authorities were telling the public not to use masks of any kind, N95 respirators were widely purchased by people who had no idea how to use them. (I've been in NYC throughout the pandemic. It's extremely common to see N95's worn with facial hair, with un-pinched nose strips, or even with the lower head-strap dangling. N95's have little value if not properly sealed.) The WHO believed advising the public to wear any mask at all would exacerbate N95 hoarding and ultimately cost lives by making them unavailable to hospitals. [Edit:] Not sure why I'm getting downvotes for this. This isn't controversial information. Dr. Fauci has given this same explanation for why mask guidance changed: > [Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE. > He explained that public health experts "were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.” > [...] > “We wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected,” Fauci concluded. See: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/502890-fauci-why-the-public-wasnt-told-to-wear-masks https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  > How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality. I'm having trouble unpacking this statement. Are you saying that a person's political ideology influences their judgment about what's objectively true regarding the WHO? Or are you saying that even when two persons agree on the objective details of WHO's behavior, their different political ideologies lead them to different sentiments regarding how well WHO performed? Or something else?
lbeltrame 6y ago
An organization that puts out a tweet (on immunity) that was, in the form it was written, totally void of any biological sense, doesn't rank much on my scale of worthiness. On the seasonality: at a seminar on the epidemiology of this disease at my institution right today, the evidence on the impact of experimental factors was described as "inconsistent" but not enough to rule out one possibility or the other. Ironically, a WHO staffer in Italy actually made a claim (or so the media said) about a "second wave" just two weeks ago. I really don't understand why it is hard for many (not necessarily just the WHO) to say "we don't know".
- danaris 6y ago
  There can be multiple waves without the virus itself being seasonal, just due to human behaviour. In particular, if we close everything down, get infections down to a nice low level, then declare victory and throw away all our masks and precautions, you better bet there'll be a "second wave" that has nothing to do with the weather.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    Honestly, thinking about winning against this virus with non pharmaceutical interventions is not sustainable on the long run. We need pharmacological means: drugs and vaccines.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  By no means am I on the side of the WHO, but I'll try and play devil's advocate here. How will most people interpret "we don't know"? You and I might understand the wisdom behind admitting to not having enough information, but the average person won't, and the media can easily mock this form of honesty. Being knowingly wrong or inconsistent seems to be a better strategy since the attention span of the average person is rather short, and appeal to authority is a pretty effective mind trick.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    However, this can lead to problematic outcomes, like WHO's tweet on immunity, which is absolutely bonkers from a biological perspective (and that was retracted, thankfully). Appeal to authority may work, but authority can fail. And when that happens, the trust is lost.
kop316 6y ago
Respectfully, I think there is a lot of mistrust in WHO is because the PRC deliberately withheld information in the 2002-2004 SARS Outbreak: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/sars-gives-china-lesson-globalization https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/sars-gives-china-lesson-... This is where the saying "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice same on me" comes into play. The below source shows the PRC covering up the COVID-19 outbreak: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382 I peronsally feel like the WHO should have been a lot more suspicious of the PRC and how they were reporting. However, it appeared like they took information from the PRC at face value in January, where containment could have spared much of this pandemic. Was it political? Much like someone else pointed out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM A senior WHO offical praises the PRC, even after it is come out the the PRC covered up the initial outbreak. It is very hard to not view that is political. To me, a lot of the mistrust of the WHO based on these sources are well founded.
- vkou 6y ago
  And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US. You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. Everything that we did wrong in mid-March and onward is squarely on our heads. Unsurprisingly, this failure gets politicized, by the people responsible deflecting their failures on another country. Vietnam and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand somehow managed to get the epidemic more or less under control - probably because they were actually busy solving the problem, instead of pointing fingers at China and the WHO. Why were they not dependent on the PRC and the WHO in making the correct response, but we were? And before someone mentions that Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are islands (Well... Maybe not Vietnam!), I would also like to point out that Hawaii is an island, and currently has 400 times the per-capita cases of Vietnam... And 4 times the per-capita cases of South Korea - despite us knowing a lot more about how to stop the virus when it had its first case.
  - kop316 6y ago
    >And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US. >You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. ....what? Did you actually read the BBC article I sourced? They punished a doctor for trying to raise the flag on this. You are telling me they handled that better than the US? And how would the US actually be to blame for that?
feanaro 6y ago
I used to have your opinion, but the behaviour I witnessed from the WHO during this pandemic does not align with the behaviour of a rationally behaving, unbiased, independent entity. I listened to several of their conferences and it was very obvious their behaviour is heavily conditioned with political matters. In one of the early conferences, Tedros spent much more time and energy on praising China than on talking about the actual disease, using flowery language I cannot describe as anything other than propagandist.

zests 6y ago

A critical shortage of cloth? What's depressing is how politicized the virus has become. How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality. If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations then we really can't say anything at all.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 6y ago
> If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations You seem certain of this. Please post a link to the high quality evidence that you think WHO should have used to recommend mask wearing in the general public. This should be either a meta-analysis or RCT that shows a clear benefit. We have plenty of RCTs of masks to prevent spread of respiratory disease. It should be very easy to find one -- you're so certain you must have already read the research, and if the effect is so clear it'd be obvious to people doing the research.
goodside 6y ago
> A critical shortage of cloth? Not cloth, but melt-blown (and to some extent spun-bond) non-woven polypropylene. This is the fabric used to make surgical masks, surgical gowns, bouffant caps, and disposable bedding for hospitals. All of these things were in shortage in March and April. The shortage of melt-blown non-woven fabric itself is now mostly over. Still in shortage are N95 respirators, which use melt-blown electret non-wovens — material given an electrostatic charge so that it attracts particles in the air. International N95-equivalent respirators are available to the public at inflated prices, but genuine (American standard) N95 masks are still difficult to find at any price. The WHO guidance against mask-wearing was a desperate attempt to mitigate N95 shortages. Even when all major health authorities were telling the public not to use masks of any kind, N95 respirators were widely purchased by people who had no idea how to use them. (I've been in NYC throughout the pandemic. It's extremely common to see N95's worn with facial hair, with un-pinched nose strips, or even with the lower head-strap dangling. N95's have little value if not properly sealed.) The WHO believed advising the public to wear any mask at all would exacerbate N95 hoarding and ultimately cost lives by making them unavailable to hospitals. [Edit:] Not sure why I'm getting downvotes for this. This isn't controversial information. Dr. Fauci has given this same explanation for why mask guidance changed: > [Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE. > He explained that public health experts "were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.” > [...] > “We wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected,” Fauci concluded. See: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/502890-fauci-why-the-public-wasnt-told-to-wear-masks https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality. I'm having trouble unpacking this statement. Are you saying that a person's political ideology influences their judgment about what's objectively true regarding the WHO? Or are you saying that even when two persons agree on the objective details of WHO's behavior, their different political ideologies lead them to different sentiments regarding how well WHO performed? Or something else?

lbeltrame 6y ago

An organization that puts out a tweet (on immunity) that was, in the form it was written, totally void of any biological sense, doesn't rank much on my scale of worthiness. On the seasonality: at a seminar on the epidemiology of this disease at my institution right today, the evidence on the impact of experimental factors was described as "inconsistent" but not enough to rule out one possibility or the other. Ironically, a WHO staffer in Italy actually made a claim (or so the media said) about a "second wave" just two weeks ago. I really don't understand why it is hard for many (not necessarily just the WHO) to say "we don't know".

danaris 6y ago
There can be multiple waves without the virus itself being seasonal, just due to human behaviour. In particular, if we close everything down, get infections down to a nice low level, then declare victory and throw away all our masks and precautions, you better bet there'll be a "second wave" that has nothing to do with the weather.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  Honestly, thinking about winning against this virus with non pharmaceutical interventions is not sustainable on the long run. We need pharmacological means: drugs and vaccines.
ravenstine 6y ago
By no means am I on the side of the WHO, but I'll try and play devil's advocate here. How will most people interpret "we don't know"? You and I might understand the wisdom behind admitting to not having enough information, but the average person won't, and the media can easily mock this form of honesty. Being knowingly wrong or inconsistent seems to be a better strategy since the attention span of the average person is rather short, and appeal to authority is a pretty effective mind trick.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  However, this can lead to problematic outcomes, like WHO's tweet on immunity, which is absolutely bonkers from a biological perspective (and that was retracted, thankfully). Appeal to authority may work, but authority can fail. And when that happens, the trust is lost.

kop316 6y ago

Respectfully, I think there is a lot of mistrust in WHO is because the PRC deliberately withheld information in the 2002-2004 SARS Outbreak: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/sars-gives-china-lesson-globalization https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/sars-gives-china-lesson-... This is where the saying "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice same on me" comes into play. The below source shows the PRC covering up the COVID-19 outbreak: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382 I peronsally feel like the WHO should have been a lot more suspicious of the PRC and how they were reporting. However, it appeared like they took information from the PRC at face value in January, where containment could have spared much of this pandemic. Was it political? Much like someone else pointed out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM A senior WHO offical praises the PRC, even after it is come out the the PRC covered up the initial outbreak. It is very hard to not view that is political. To me, a lot of the mistrust of the WHO based on these sources are well founded.

vkou 6y ago
And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US. You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. Everything that we did wrong in mid-March and onward is squarely on our heads. Unsurprisingly, this failure gets politicized, by the people responsible deflecting their failures on another country. Vietnam and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand somehow managed to get the epidemic more or less under control - probably because they were actually busy solving the problem, instead of pointing fingers at China and the WHO. Why were they not dependent on the PRC and the WHO in making the correct response, but we were? And before someone mentions that Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are islands (Well... Maybe not Vietnam!), I would also like to point out that Hawaii is an island, and currently has 400 times the per-capita cases of Vietnam... And 4 times the per-capita cases of South Korea - despite us knowing a lot more about how to stop the virus when it had its first case.
- kop316 6y ago
  >And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US. >You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. ....what? Did you actually read the BBC article I sourced? They punished a doctor for trying to raise the flag on this. You are telling me they handled that better than the US? And how would the US actually be to blame for that?

feanaro 6y ago

I used to have your opinion, but the behaviour I witnessed from the WHO during this pandemic does not align with the behaviour of a rationally behaving, unbiased, independent entity. I listened to several of their conferences and it was very obvious their behaviour is heavily conditioned with political matters. In one of the early conferences, Tedros spent much more time and energy on praising China than on talking about the actual disease, using flowery language I cannot describe as anything other than propagandist.