4 ms·

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

by 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?
  - nl 6y ago
    I'm going to preface this comment by noting that this is a subtle argument I'm making, and HN posts about C19 probably isn't the best place for this. But anyway.. I don't agree this was a "cover-up" in the sense of a government attempt to hide something they knew was going on. As your own article says "What Dr Li didn't know then was that the disease that had been discovered was an entirely new coronavirus." He was warned about spreading rumors. While I don't agree with the way they warn people for things like that in China, it isn't uncommon for this to happen to anyone who disturbs "social cohesion". Additionally, it was done by the regional government, not the central one. In contemporary news coverage of the outbreak they note how the regional government tried to minimize the severity of the outbreak and it was the central government who intervened to lock the place down. Could China have done better? Yes - I've run the timeline, and I think it was realistic for them to have known and acted about 2 or 3 days earlier than they Wuhan lockdown in the absolute best case. Do I think this would have made a difference for the rest of the world? Not really - the places that dealt with it well acted when the lock down occurred, and the places that didn't deal with it well ignored that. It's worth noting that most of the world couldn't believe the Wuhan lockdown when it happened. I don't think places that ignored that news would have acted on any kind of WHO warning.
goodside 6y ago
The WHO didn't praise the PRC because they believed in them, they did it because they needed the PRC's cooperation to have any information about what's happening in Wuhan. They obviously kowtowed to the PRC in repeating their propaganda, so you should take their pro-Beijing messaging with a grain of salt, but expediency during the Wuhan outbreak doesn't make them puppets either. The WHO is funded primarily by the United States (despite Trump's recent threats), the United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. China contributes less than a tenth of what the US does. The idea that WHO is permanently beholden to China just doesn't add up. Now that China is no longer the center of the outbreak, WHO's praise of the PRC has (as far as I can tell) completely stopped.
- kop316 6y ago
  >The WHO didn't praise the PRC because they believed in them, they did it because they needed the PRC's cooperation to have any information about what's happening in Wuhan. In my personal belief, if the WHO had any intregity, they would have not played ball and warned every other country about what China is doing. They did the same exact thing back in 2002-2004 (per the article I sourced).

by kop316 6y ago

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?
- nl 6y ago
  I'm going to preface this comment by noting that this is a subtle argument I'm making, and HN posts about C19 probably isn't the best place for this. But anyway.. I don't agree this was a "cover-up" in the sense of a government attempt to hide something they knew was going on. As your own article says "What Dr Li didn't know then was that the disease that had been discovered was an entirely new coronavirus." He was warned about spreading rumors. While I don't agree with the way they warn people for things like that in China, it isn't uncommon for this to happen to anyone who disturbs "social cohesion". Additionally, it was done by the regional government, not the central one. In contemporary news coverage of the outbreak they note how the regional government tried to minimize the severity of the outbreak and it was the central government who intervened to lock the place down. Could China have done better? Yes - I've run the timeline, and I think it was realistic for them to have known and acted about 2 or 3 days earlier than they Wuhan lockdown in the absolute best case. Do I think this would have made a difference for the rest of the world? Not really - the places that dealt with it well acted when the lock down occurred, and the places that didn't deal with it well ignored that. It's worth noting that most of the world couldn't believe the Wuhan lockdown when it happened. I don't think places that ignored that news would have acted on any kind of WHO warning.

goodside 6y ago

The WHO didn't praise the PRC because they believed in them, they did it because they needed the PRC's cooperation to have any information about what's happening in Wuhan. They obviously kowtowed to the PRC in repeating their propaganda, so you should take their pro-Beijing messaging with a grain of salt, but expediency during the Wuhan outbreak doesn't make them puppets either. The WHO is funded primarily by the United States (despite Trump's recent threats), the United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. China contributes less than a tenth of what the US does. The idea that WHO is permanently beholden to China just doesn't add up. Now that China is no longer the center of the outbreak, WHO's praise of the PRC has (as far as I can tell) completely stopped.

kop316 6y ago
>The WHO didn't praise the PRC because they believed in them, they did it because they needed the PRC's cooperation to have any information about what's happening in Wuhan. In my personal belief, if the WHO had any intregity, they would have not played ball and warned every other country about what China is doing. They did the same exact thing back in 2002-2004 (per the article I sourced).