10 ms·

The null hypothesis is of course the most probable and bio is insanely hard. But it’s not clear to me that the WHO has any credibility left. Edit: This is no

The null hypothesis is of course the most probable and bio is insanely hard. But it’s not clear to me that the WHO has any credibility left. Edit: This is not a coded American Politics statement. Here are examples of where the WHO provided directly counterproductive recommendations: 1. Don’t wear masks (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/30/worl...) 2. Don’t close borders (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-says-countries-should-keep-borders-open-trade-people-moving-despite-coronavirus-idUKKBN1ZU1C2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-says...) 3. COVID is not airborne (https://m.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935 https://m.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935) (pedantic takes aside you should obviously treat it is if it were)

spuz 6y ago
What does this mean?
- hef19898 6y ago
  That he is one of the people that don't believe anything anymore the WHO says because they got the thing with the masks wrong.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    IIRC the 'masks wrong' accusation was more about the CDC than the WHO. As I recall, the WHO caught a lot of flak early on for press releases written in strict scientific language that were easily construed to mean something entirely different. They earned a bit of criticism for that, since they should have written those PR bits for the lay audience that it was intended for.
    - TaupeRanger 6y ago
      I fully realize this will incur a mob of downvotes, but the evidence on masks is still unsettled, despite clamoring on social media and some news media. I would encourage people to listen to a balanced view on doctor Vinay Prasad's excellent podcast "Plenary Session". Even mentioning the possibility that this might be true is enough to get shouted down and accused of supporting Trump. In fact, it is quite unclear whether widespread masking is a net positive for US populations. It hasn't been shown to be effective, and there are still many unstudied avenues that could lead to a negative result. Just a couple examples: 1. Giving people a false sense of security, causing them to go out when they feel sick when they otherwise wouldn't. 2. Causing more face-touching behavior while fiddling with the mask, making infection more likely. We just don't know the answer.
    - andybak 6y ago
      The sibling post was rather unjustly flagged. I'm often on the other side of the fence on this but in this case I think it was unfair.
    - vharuck 6y ago
      I've always thought of the WHO as serving an audience of public health experts for the member nations. Then those nations can decide what the best response is within their borders. When I remember back on the news about the other recent pandemic scares (ebola, swine flu, zika), I don't remember hearing any mention of the WHO. I'm sure it happened, but not nearly as much as CDC. We hear about their announcements a lot more often now, but how much is that due to being cast as antagonists by DC?
      - vkou 6y ago
        If the Ebola epidemic killed 200,000 people in the United States, due to a completely bungled response by the CDC, you could bet that the supporters of the administration in power at the time would be burning effigies of the WHO.
      - rsynnott 6y ago
        That is what the WHO used to do, certainly. It does seem to talk more directly to the press these days, and it's honestly probably not a great idea.
        vharuck 6y ago
        Going by their news releases page, it doesn't seem like even 2020 has more listings than most years: https://www.who.int/news https://www.who.int/news I'm now leaning more toward my hypothesis that they haven't changed behavior much, but US reporters are citing them now because the current administration brought them into the story. In the past, reporters probably read the WHO announcements but quoted from CDC same academic experts. Again, WHO info is dry.
  - sova 6y ago
    Or, you know, this now infamous Tweet: https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152 https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      That's an entirely accurate tweet at the time. On Jan 14, 2020, the WHO had no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission yet. It came (to them) shortly afterwards. That China may have had such evidence and kept it private doesn't make the WHO's statement any less truthful at the time it was issued. They aren't an intelligence organization; they rely on cooperative member nations. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/factchecking-trumps-attack-on-the-who/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/factchecking-trumps-attack... > While there is a debate about what was known when — and it seems clear that China knew more than what it reported — the WHO never said the virus was not communicable. Instead, the agency always considered the possibility, even if it also shared information from China that found no evidence of such transmission. > Lack of evidence, especially of “preliminary” results, does not mean the WHO was saying the novel coronavirus could not be spread between people. The same day as the tweet, the WHO cautioned that there might be some human-to-human transmission of the virus among family members in China. > According to a timeline of events, Van Kerkhove, who is also the WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 response, also said that human-to-human transmission wouldn’t be unexpected, since that is what occurs with SARS and MERS, which are also coronaviruses. Just a few days later: > By Jan. 19, the WHO was more definitive, saying in a tweet that there was “some limited human-to-human transmission occurring between close contacts.” Trying to use this tweet to justify US inaction months later is silly and transparent.
      - hef19898 6y ago
        Thanks!
      - nwienert 6y ago
        It wasn’t lacking evidence at all, want to know why? Because I read that headline at the time and thought it was ridiculous, I couldn’t believe they were saying something so backwards. If you had been paying attention, you knew already: 1. It was spreading rapidly in humans 2. It was a coronavirus and therefore was similar to other coronaviruses If you were following a precautionary principle, you’d have said “it likely is spreading between humans given we’ve never seen any other form of transmission this rapid in any virus that isn’t, and it’s a coronavirus”. If you think their “don’t wear masks” lie was ok because it was trying to keep medical workers from a shortage, then, how can you not see this as hypocritical? You can’t think the mask lie was ok, due to abundance of caution, and then a total disregard for caution at a much more crucial early stage as ok. But again, if you were paying attention, watching the WHO make statements like this was terrifying. Like driving in a car with a drunk driver who is stepping on the gas. Who in their right mind would make such a totally braindead, reckless press release like that. Technically there’s no direct evidence, but there’s a whole lot of reason to be worried it likely is airborne. So the headline should be “it’s highly possible it’s airborne, we are waiting for concrete data, but recommend caution given exponential spread within humans”. The WHO did things similarly shockingly bad three times or so during the pandemic. I was paying attention to all of them and couldn’t help but think something was up. Something was wrong with the WHO. Not just being conservative, but being totally negligent and backwards time and time again. It really seems they were playing either protection for China, or some sort of interference against a good chunk of the world. If they had done better, many many lives would have been saved. It was some internal politics that broke them. Any halfway sane person knew it at the time.
  - dqv 6y ago
    I don't remember that, but they got the thing about restricting travel wrong. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1ZX1H3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...
  - hnracer 6y ago
    It's not just the masks. They also got many other things wrong, and the leader of the WHO has a number of corruption allegations with some veracity to their name.
QUPHAJS3V6 6y ago
Why? I know WHO is now politically involved in the US elections and I presume that shapes many opinions. But, I did read recently about polio eradication from the African continent etc. Obviously not just by WHO but efforts by many organizations, but still a major achievement isnt it? Update: I actually would like to know why WHO is not credible any more for some. Honest question.
- makomk 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the whole polio eradication thing is less of an clear-cut success story than the headlines made it seem - they only eradicated wild-type polio, there are still major outbreaks in Africa of vaccine-derived polioviruses that have lost the mutations which made them safe and started spreading in the community and paralyzing people, those have only been getting more widespread last I heard and there doesn't seem to be any clear route to a solution. Can't imagine that Covid has helped much with that either, given the disruption to vaccination programs worldwide - vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks thrive wherever vaccination is disrupted or incomplete, or there's a border between vaccinated and non-vaccinated regions. The original plan that the WHO and the rest of the global health community came up to deal with this also seems like total magical thinking to me - basically, everywhere would drop the type 2 poliovirus component (which corresponded to a virus whose wild type had been eliminated) from their live vaccines at once, which would leave none to turn into vaccine-derived poliovirus and type 2 woud just go away. It didn't work that way. I can't fathom why it even should. Nonetheless, there were lots of fancy documents and presentations from the WHO and other such organisations explaining this strategy very hopefully. The current ones don't have the same level of hope.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - orwin 6y ago
    Please explain why you're downvoting, this is a fact, only wild polio is "eradicated" from africa, not vaccine-induced polio (type 1 and type 2 are often milder than wild polio however). And i think there was a polio outbreak in Soudan this year, so...
QUPHAJS3V6 6y ago
Fair enough. Who/what organizations do you trust then for public health and covid related recommendations?
- pdonis 6y ago
  My short answer: there aren't any. Every source has shown itself willing to set truth aside in the interest of some political or ideological agenda. If your response is "well, that sucks", yes, I agree. It sucks to live in a world where people and institutions whose sole job is supposed to be making sure true information gets to the public, every time, no exceptions, are either unwilling or unable to do that job right.
  - BalinKing 6y ago
    This is where I also stand. I don't (a prior) trust the WHO, I don't (a priori) trust the CDC, I don't (a priori) trust the talk show hosts. (To be fair, I think this principle applies much more generally than public health matters.) That's not to say I behave irresponsibly: I wear a mask in public (because "better safe than sorry"), my family self-quarantined for two weeks when one of us got sick, etc. I just don't assume what "experts" say is necessarily the truth. (To be fair, I also don't trust myself to reach correct conclusions—hence my personal policy of "better safe than sorry.") I personally feel like too much of modern society involves idolizing experts and institutions—after all, it's nothing more than the argument-to-authority logical fallacy (admittedly, even if it's often a useful heuristic)... but that's a discussion for another time :-P
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > That's not to say I behave irresponsibly: I wear a mask in public (because "better safe than sorry") Same here. My wife and I were wearing masks, social distancing, not going to public places like restaurants where there was a high risk of catching something, weeks before any public health authorities were recommending such measures, and before the case rate in our area started to spike. To us it was obvious common sense.
    - 6y ago
anigbrowl 6y ago
Has WHO lost some credibility through a combination of poor decisions, poor communications, and rapidly changing scientific understanding? For sure. Suggesting that WHO has no credibility left is hyperbolic and unhelpful.
ksk 6y ago
>1. Don’t wear masks False. They said - "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit" "In the community, we do not recommend the use of wearing masks unless you yourself are sick and as a measure to prevent onward spread from you if you are ill" "The masks that we recommend are for people who are at home and who are sick and for those individuals who are caring for those people who are home that are sick," These are completely normal statements. >2. Don’t close borders False. The said "There is a “huge reason to keep official border crossings open” to avoid people entering irregularly and going unchecked for symptoms, " "Certain containment measures will be appropriate, but widely banning travel, closing down cities, and hoarding resources are not realistic solutions for an outbreak that lasts years." >3. COVID is not airborne Please understand that airborne has a scientific meaning, and that is the terminology that scientists use. There is no actual clinical evidence of the airborne transmission of COVID.It is spread through large droplets. If it was airborne, those cloth and surgical masks that people wear would be useless, so you might as well not wear them. -- >But it’s not clear to me that the WHO has any credibility left. Maybe that is true for you, but ironically your wild accusations have let me wondering about your agenda here. :)
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > Please understand that airborne has a scientific meaning, and that is the terminology that scientists use. There is no actual clinical evidence of the airborne transmission of COVID.It is spread through large droplets. At this point, it's expert consensus that airborne transmission of COVID is a significant if not the major route of transmission[1]. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14857 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14857 > If it was airborne, those cloth and surgical masks that people wear would be useless, so you might as well not wear them. Not quite useless, but nowhere near as effective as people would like to believe them to be.
  - ksk 6y ago
    Please explain on what basis you are assigning a paper "expert consensus" ? Are you an infectious diseases researcher? If so, your opinion would matter more to me than the paper. I read dozens of studies every day as part of my job in biotech, and most papers are junk and/or contain overly enthusiastic claims that few can replicate. I know somehow on HN linking to a paper is seen as a mic-drop, but that is not the case in the real world.
cscurmudgeon 6y ago
Remember, the WHO recommends traditional Chinese medicine. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01726-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01726-1 Edit: downvoted for stating facts and linking to a Nature article? I guess HN has a soft spot for peddlers of pseudoscience and rhino boner pills as long as it their side politically. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 This is where I draw the line.
- triceratops 6y ago
  That's not what the article you linked says. It says the WHO includes the names of various ailments and diseases under traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). That's the not the same as recommending the use of TCM.
  - cscurmudgeon 6y ago
    False. It says right in the article that they also include treatments and medicines. Does it do that for Ayurveda and other traditional treatments? Why not? I guess Nature is worried for an irrational reason? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 Please don’t twist yourself batting for this nonsense.
    - triceratops 6y ago
      > It says right in the article that they also include treatments and medicines Can you please paste the relevant quote from the article? Because I'm not seeing that. The part I looked at was: "In a statement on 4 April, it insisted that the TCM chapter does not discuss particular remedies. Rather, it is meant to give doctors the chance to diagnose patients using both TCM and Western medicine — what it calls “optional dual coding”. These categories “do not refer to — or endorse — any form of treatment”, the statement says."
hnracer 6y ago
The individual that leads the WHO also has a number of corruption and cover-up allegations. Let's also not forget that they refused to declare a pandemic until weeks after there was evidence of global spread. The negligence (intentional or otherwise) is truly shocking.
- papito 6y ago
  Donald Trump would have raised holy hell if a pandemic was declared earlier. It would have been a globalist plot to crash the markets and tank his presidency. He would have threatened to withdraw from the WHO entirely and pull U.S. funding. [Checks notes] Ah - he did anyway.
Animats 6y ago
The mask thing was a mess. But even back then, WHO was clear on why they said that: "We need to be clear. The world is facing a significant shortage of PPE for our frontline workers -- including masks and gloves and gowns and face shields -- and protecting our health care workers must be the top priority for use of this PPE." That's very World Health Organization, which is used to operating under scarcity. The embarrassing thing now is that, eight months on, we don't have a huge supply of N95 masks, which actually protect the wearer. On eBay, the price is starting to drop, from about $10 each to about $5 each. Normal price is about $1 each.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

spuz 6y ago

What does this mean?

hef19898 6y ago
That he is one of the people that don't believe anything anymore the WHO says because they got the thing with the masks wrong.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  IIRC the 'masks wrong' accusation was more about the CDC than the WHO. As I recall, the WHO caught a lot of flak early on for press releases written in strict scientific language that were easily construed to mean something entirely different. They earned a bit of criticism for that, since they should have written those PR bits for the lay audience that it was intended for.
  - TaupeRanger 6y ago
    I fully realize this will incur a mob of downvotes, but the evidence on masks is still unsettled, despite clamoring on social media and some news media. I would encourage people to listen to a balanced view on doctor Vinay Prasad's excellent podcast "Plenary Session". Even mentioning the possibility that this might be true is enough to get shouted down and accused of supporting Trump. In fact, it is quite unclear whether widespread masking is a net positive for US populations. It hasn't been shown to be effective, and there are still many unstudied avenues that could lead to a negative result. Just a couple examples: 1. Giving people a false sense of security, causing them to go out when they feel sick when they otherwise wouldn't. 2. Causing more face-touching behavior while fiddling with the mask, making infection more likely. We just don't know the answer.
  - andybak 6y ago
    The sibling post was rather unjustly flagged. I'm often on the other side of the fence on this but in this case I think it was unfair.
  - vharuck 6y ago
    I've always thought of the WHO as serving an audience of public health experts for the member nations. Then those nations can decide what the best response is within their borders. When I remember back on the news about the other recent pandemic scares (ebola, swine flu, zika), I don't remember hearing any mention of the WHO. I'm sure it happened, but not nearly as much as CDC. We hear about their announcements a lot more often now, but how much is that due to being cast as antagonists by DC?
    - vkou 6y ago
      If the Ebola epidemic killed 200,000 people in the United States, due to a completely bungled response by the CDC, you could bet that the supporters of the administration in power at the time would be burning effigies of the WHO.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      That is what the WHO used to do, certainly. It does seem to talk more directly to the press these days, and it's honestly probably not a great idea.
      - vharuck 6y ago
        Going by their news releases page, it doesn't seem like even 2020 has more listings than most years: https://www.who.int/news https://www.who.int/news I'm now leaning more toward my hypothesis that they haven't changed behavior much, but US reporters are citing them now because the current administration brought them into the story. In the past, reporters probably read the WHO announcements but quoted from CDC same academic experts. Again, WHO info is dry.
- sova 6y ago
  Or, you know, this now infamous Tweet: https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152 https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    That's an entirely accurate tweet at the time. On Jan 14, 2020, the WHO had no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission yet. It came (to them) shortly afterwards. That China may have had such evidence and kept it private doesn't make the WHO's statement any less truthful at the time it was issued. They aren't an intelligence organization; they rely on cooperative member nations. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/factchecking-trumps-attack-on-the-who/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/factchecking-trumps-attack... > While there is a debate about what was known when — and it seems clear that China knew more than what it reported — the WHO never said the virus was not communicable. Instead, the agency always considered the possibility, even if it also shared information from China that found no evidence of such transmission. > Lack of evidence, especially of “preliminary” results, does not mean the WHO was saying the novel coronavirus could not be spread between people. The same day as the tweet, the WHO cautioned that there might be some human-to-human transmission of the virus among family members in China. > According to a timeline of events, Van Kerkhove, who is also the WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 response, also said that human-to-human transmission wouldn’t be unexpected, since that is what occurs with SARS and MERS, which are also coronaviruses. Just a few days later: > By Jan. 19, the WHO was more definitive, saying in a tweet that there was “some limited human-to-human transmission occurring between close contacts.” Trying to use this tweet to justify US inaction months later is silly and transparent.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Thanks!
    - nwienert 6y ago
      It wasn’t lacking evidence at all, want to know why? Because I read that headline at the time and thought it was ridiculous, I couldn’t believe they were saying something so backwards. If you had been paying attention, you knew already: 1. It was spreading rapidly in humans 2. It was a coronavirus and therefore was similar to other coronaviruses If you were following a precautionary principle, you’d have said “it likely is spreading between humans given we’ve never seen any other form of transmission this rapid in any virus that isn’t, and it’s a coronavirus”. If you think their “don’t wear masks” lie was ok because it was trying to keep medical workers from a shortage, then, how can you not see this as hypocritical? You can’t think the mask lie was ok, due to abundance of caution, and then a total disregard for caution at a much more crucial early stage as ok. But again, if you were paying attention, watching the WHO make statements like this was terrifying. Like driving in a car with a drunk driver who is stepping on the gas. Who in their right mind would make such a totally braindead, reckless press release like that. Technically there’s no direct evidence, but there’s a whole lot of reason to be worried it likely is airborne. So the headline should be “it’s highly possible it’s airborne, we are waiting for concrete data, but recommend caution given exponential spread within humans”. The WHO did things similarly shockingly bad three times or so during the pandemic. I was paying attention to all of them and couldn’t help but think something was up. Something was wrong with the WHO. Not just being conservative, but being totally negligent and backwards time and time again. It really seems they were playing either protection for China, or some sort of interference against a good chunk of the world. If they had done better, many many lives would have been saved. It was some internal politics that broke them. Any halfway sane person knew it at the time.
- dqv 6y ago
  I don't remember that, but they got the thing about restricting travel wrong. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1ZX1H3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...
- hnracer 6y ago
  It's not just the masks. They also got many other things wrong, and the leader of the WHO has a number of corruption allegations with some veracity to their name.

QUPHAJS3V6 6y ago

Why? I know WHO is now politically involved in the US elections and I presume that shapes many opinions. But, I did read recently about polio eradication from the African continent etc. Obviously not just by WHO but efforts by many organizations, but still a major achievement isnt it? Update: I actually would like to know why WHO is not credible any more for some. Honest question.

makomk 6y ago
Unfortunately, the whole polio eradication thing is less of an clear-cut success story than the headlines made it seem - they only eradicated wild-type polio, there are still major outbreaks in Africa of vaccine-derived polioviruses that have lost the mutations which made them safe and started spreading in the community and paralyzing people, those have only been getting more widespread last I heard and there doesn't seem to be any clear route to a solution. Can't imagine that Covid has helped much with that either, given the disruption to vaccination programs worldwide - vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks thrive wherever vaccination is disrupted or incomplete, or there's a border between vaccinated and non-vaccinated regions. The original plan that the WHO and the rest of the global health community came up to deal with this also seems like total magical thinking to me - basically, everywhere would drop the type 2 poliovirus component (which corresponded to a virus whose wild type had been eliminated) from their live vaccines at once, which would leave none to turn into vaccine-derived poliovirus and type 2 woud just go away. It didn't work that way. I can't fathom why it even should. Nonetheless, there were lots of fancy documents and presentations from the WHO and other such organisations explaining this strategy very hopefully. The current ones don't have the same level of hope.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- orwin 6y ago
  Please explain why you're downvoting, this is a fact, only wild polio is "eradicated" from africa, not vaccine-induced polio (type 1 and type 2 are often milder than wild polio however). And i think there was a polio outbreak in Soudan this year, so...

QUPHAJS3V6 6y ago

Fair enough. Who/what organizations do you trust then for public health and covid related recommendations?

pdonis 6y ago
My short answer: there aren't any. Every source has shown itself willing to set truth aside in the interest of some political or ideological agenda. If your response is "well, that sucks", yes, I agree. It sucks to live in a world where people and institutions whose sole job is supposed to be making sure true information gets to the public, every time, no exceptions, are either unwilling or unable to do that job right.
- BalinKing 6y ago
  This is where I also stand. I don't (a prior) trust the WHO, I don't (a priori) trust the CDC, I don't (a priori) trust the talk show hosts. (To be fair, I think this principle applies much more generally than public health matters.) That's not to say I behave irresponsibly: I wear a mask in public (because "better safe than sorry"), my family self-quarantined for two weeks when one of us got sick, etc. I just don't assume what "experts" say is necessarily the truth. (To be fair, I also don't trust myself to reach correct conclusions—hence my personal policy of "better safe than sorry.") I personally feel like too much of modern society involves idolizing experts and institutions—after all, it's nothing more than the argument-to-authority logical fallacy (admittedly, even if it's often a useful heuristic)... but that's a discussion for another time :-P
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > That's not to say I behave irresponsibly: I wear a mask in public (because "better safe than sorry") Same here. My wife and I were wearing masks, social distancing, not going to public places like restaurants where there was a high risk of catching something, weeks before any public health authorities were recommending such measures, and before the case rate in our area started to spike. To us it was obvious common sense.
  - 6y ago

anigbrowl 6y ago

Has WHO lost some credibility through a combination of poor decisions, poor communications, and rapidly changing scientific understanding? For sure. Suggesting that WHO has no credibility left is hyperbolic and unhelpful.

ksk 6y ago

>1. Don’t wear masks False. They said - "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit" "In the community, we do not recommend the use of wearing masks unless you yourself are sick and as a measure to prevent onward spread from you if you are ill" "The masks that we recommend are for people who are at home and who are sick and for those individuals who are caring for those people who are home that are sick," These are completely normal statements. >2. Don’t close borders False. The said "There is a “huge reason to keep official border crossings open” to avoid people entering irregularly and going unchecked for symptoms, " "Certain containment measures will be appropriate, but widely banning travel, closing down cities, and hoarding resources are not realistic solutions for an outbreak that lasts years." >3. COVID is not airborne Please understand that airborne has a scientific meaning, and that is the terminology that scientists use. There is no actual clinical evidence of the airborne transmission of COVID.It is spread through large droplets. If it was airborne, those cloth and surgical masks that people wear would be useless, so you might as well not wear them. -- >But it’s not clear to me that the WHO has any credibility left. Maybe that is true for you, but ironically your wild accusations have let me wondering about your agenda here. :)

gridlockd 6y ago
> Please understand that airborne has a scientific meaning, and that is the terminology that scientists use. There is no actual clinical evidence of the airborne transmission of COVID.It is spread through large droplets. At this point, it's expert consensus that airborne transmission of COVID is a significant if not the major route of transmission[1]. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14857 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14857 > If it was airborne, those cloth and surgical masks that people wear would be useless, so you might as well not wear them. Not quite useless, but nowhere near as effective as people would like to believe them to be.
- ksk 6y ago
  Please explain on what basis you are assigning a paper "expert consensus" ? Are you an infectious diseases researcher? If so, your opinion would matter more to me than the paper. I read dozens of studies every day as part of my job in biotech, and most papers are junk and/or contain overly enthusiastic claims that few can replicate. I know somehow on HN linking to a paper is seen as a mic-drop, but that is not the case in the real world.

cscurmudgeon 6y ago

Remember, the WHO recommends traditional Chinese medicine. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01726-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01726-1 Edit: downvoted for stating facts and linking to a Nature article? I guess HN has a soft spot for peddlers of pseudoscience and rhino boner pills as long as it their side politically. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 This is where I draw the line.

triceratops 6y ago
That's not what the article you linked says. It says the WHO includes the names of various ailments and diseases under traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). That's the not the same as recommending the use of TCM.
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  False. It says right in the article that they also include treatments and medicines. Does it do that for Ayurveda and other traditional treatments? Why not? I guess Nature is worried for an irrational reason? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06782-7 Please don’t twist yourself batting for this nonsense.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    > It says right in the article that they also include treatments and medicines Can you please paste the relevant quote from the article? Because I'm not seeing that. The part I looked at was: "In a statement on 4 April, it insisted that the TCM chapter does not discuss particular remedies. Rather, it is meant to give doctors the chance to diagnose patients using both TCM and Western medicine — what it calls “optional dual coding”. These categories “do not refer to — or endorse — any form of treatment”, the statement says."

hnracer 6y ago

The individual that leads the WHO also has a number of corruption and cover-up allegations. Let's also not forget that they refused to declare a pandemic until weeks after there was evidence of global spread. The negligence (intentional or otherwise) is truly shocking.

papito 6y ago
Donald Trump would have raised holy hell if a pandemic was declared earlier. It would have been a globalist plot to crash the markets and tank his presidency. He would have threatened to withdraw from the WHO entirely and pull U.S. funding. [Checks notes] Ah - he did anyway.

Animats 6y ago

The mask thing was a mess. But even back then, WHO was clear on why they said that: "We need to be clear. The world is facing a significant shortage of PPE for our frontline workers -- including masks and gloves and gowns and face shields -- and protecting our health care workers must be the top priority for use of this PPE." That's very World Health Organization, which is used to operating under scarcity. The embarrassing thing now is that, eight months on, we don't have a huge supply of N95 masks, which actually protect the wearer. On eBay, the price is starting to drop, from about $10 each to about $5 each. Normal price is about $1 each.

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