5 ms·

I hope this happens. The world needs more collaboration, especially in pandemic response.

by nynx 5y ago

anonnyj 5y ago
I too welcome fascism via vaccines.
ethbr0 5y ago
Of all the problems international cooperation could tackle, pandemics seem like they should be the easiest. Either you are dealing with one, or you aren't. Pretty stark contrast. So should make countries more comfortable ceding sovereignty, knowing it's going to be only in exceptional circumstances. Coupled with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has proven that even the most stringent border lockdowns fail in the face of highly transmissible, asymptomatic threats. Which makes this an "everyone" problem instead of a "head in the sand is okay" one. And finally, you're dealing with something that is generally agreed on: dead humans are bad and to be avoided. Godspeed to those trying to broker consensus.
- golemotron 5y ago
  > Either you are dealing with one, or you aren't. Pretty stark contrast. So should make countries more comfortable ceding sovereignty, knowing it's going to be only in exceptional circumstances. Without a hard metric it's a slippery slope and governments will not cede emergency powers. That's been the history of nearly all emergency powers. Ask yourself how long this pandemic will last and whether anyone will agree upon criteria for its end.
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    I feel like this argument is still in bad faith. A co-worker last year was talking about how a mask mandate was the biggest violation of freedom ever in American history. So I kindly reminded my co-worker, internment camps for Japanese-americans were less of a violation? Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus during the civil war? Those are just two examples of many. These were all moves made by emergency powers that were...... given up by government when the situation ended.
    - golemotron 5y ago
      Emergency powers from the Patriot Act are still in effect. The problem this pandemic (and pandemics in general) is that there is no defined end and no one seems to be willing to create one. It is either a certain number of deaths per million or zero (eradication), which would put us in smallpox territory - about two centuries.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        "The fact that humans are the only reservoir for smallpox infection and that carriers did not exist, played a significant role in the eradication of smallpox." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication SARS-CoV-2 eradication is probably impossible.
        golemotron 5y ago
        Yup. And that's why I would not want to see a treaty. Better to have nations acting independently of each other at the policy level, learning from each other's experiences. It's like a market where nations can explore different tradeoffs in how they declare an end or live with it.
        ethbr0 5y ago
        What if my tradeoff is "I will partially vaccinate everyone in my country and not perform any surveillance, tracking, or sequencing and stockpile any critical PPE and prohibit export of vaccines"? Absurd example, but that seems pretty harmful to every country with transportation links to me.
        golemotron 5y ago
        There's the concept of a border. They have liabilities but they have benefits too. We are too used to thinking of them as completely bad.
      - tcmart14 5y ago
- jerkstate 5y ago
  I really wish that we had a collective, global experience during the COVID-19 pandemic that made everyone trust that the national and international authorities had all of our best interests at heart and that they would implement controls fairly and judiciously with constant monitoring of efficacy and incremental improvement of methods, communication with honesty and transparency, and above all, respecting individuals. However, correct or incorrect, this has not been the experience of many during this pandemic. So there can be no surrender of sovereignty, personal or otherwise, from a large enough portion of the population, which would make any attempt at international control pointless at best, and tyrannical and horrific at worse. I truly hope that the governments of the world learn from their mistakes instead of blindly pushing forward with their current approach.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  > even the most stringent border lockdowns fail Except we never had a serious lockdown. Most businesses were still open because of loose terms of what is essential or finding loopholes like bars serving food with beer so they can be considered a restaurant and other ridiculous things.
  - HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
    Real lockdowns have never been tried!
- topkai22 5y ago
  Point of order- The most stringent border lockdowns actually worked shockingly well, see New Zealand, for example. Also “you are either in a pandemic, or you aren’t” isn’t the important part of a response framework. The far more important part is preventing novel diseases from becoming a pandemic in the first place, even if they have the potential to be.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    New Zealand isn't very representative of the world, geographically and in effective population density. Coupled with the fact that it's a fundamentally unstable system to mate "highly transmissible pathogen" with "single layer of protection." There's a reason network security is migrating to zero trust, and it shares many parallels with pandemic modeling. Yes, border lockdowns will work if a country gets lucky. How long can they stay lucky? I'm also suspicious we can identify novel diseases fast enough (presumably in animal reservoirs) fast enough to be effective. There are too many unseen places on this planet, and pathogens evolve too quickly. Again, it only takes one. What should be boosted and universalized is disease surveillance. The patchwork (nationally and internationally) systems for stitching together sample -> testing -> result communication could bear a lot of improvement.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  > Coupled with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has proven that even the most stringent border lockdowns fail in the face of highly transmissible, asymptomatic threats. Which makes this an "everyone" problem instead of a "head in the sand is okay" one. The “most stringent border lockdowns” didn’t happen, at least not in a timely way. The WHO is one reason why - even at the end of January 2020 they recommended against countries taking measures like border closures. The US travel ban didn’t get implemented until February 2020, and it still had various exemptions and tens of thousands of travelers from Hubei continued to pour into the US. What really should have happened is that China should have voluntarily shut down all their international ports in mid-December 2019. Unfortunately even though China shut down some domestic flights in January 2020, they didn’t shut international flights until March 2020 (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how-china-locked-down-internally-for-covid-19-but-pushed-foreign-travel/ https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...), following a call between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    in January 2020, nobody, including you thought this was going to go as far and as fast as it did. By then, very likely the cat was already out of the bag and a worldwide travel ban would have helped but would not have prevented the pandemic outright. Was this a mistake? Yes, because that decision violates the cautionary principle when dealing with novel diseases. The WHO was concerned with being found to be 'alarmist' but this time around that would have been the right position to take. Ironically had they done so and prevented the pandemic from spreading you would now be berating them for being such idiots that they caused us all to stop traveling for nothing in 2020, on account of the prevention paradox. And that makes you part of the problem: there is nothing that the WHO could have done that in your eyes would have been a proportional response, and when you are dealing with a novel pathogen mistakes are inevitable. A bit of restraint and some more thinking about this on your part would go a long way towards a more reasonable stance. But those that see the UN and the WHO as the root of all evil tend to do everything they can to avoid seeing reason, instead everything gets bent to the 'UN bad' talking point.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
systemvoltage 5y ago
It is worth refreshing the memory about how the WHO handled the initial stages of the pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c07MnRmJPcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c07MnRmJPcI While I am OK with science being wrong and then corrected, WHO has eroded public trust in staying objective and seeking truth.
hikergirl1234 5y ago
I would argue the opposite - the world needs less collaboration [coercion] in pandemic response. Having the WHO bludgeon countries into obeying standards set by a small committee of elites is an abuse of power waiting to happen.
- AJ007 5y ago
  From telling people it wasn’t airborne and they shouldn’t wear masks to saying no booster shots, their credibility is toast.
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    All those points are taken out of context and are misleading.
  - ed25519FUUU 5y ago
    Are they still saying it’s “impossible” the virus escaped from a Chinese weapons lab?
    - wesleywt 5y ago
      As a biologist looking at comments like these make me concerned that the general public has not learned its lesson on pandemics yet. It is far more concerning our destruction of the environment and our encroachment of habitats will lead to way more pandemics.
      - ed25519FUUU 5y ago
        I’m very much concerned with our government funding gof research in a foreign and adversarial weapons laboratory. Stopping that research would be a very important lesson to learn in this pandemic because it might actually be able to stop the next covid 19.
        jacquesm 5y ago
        Yes, stopping such research is important. But it has nothing to do with COVID-19.

I hope this happens. The world needs more collaboration, especially in pandemic response.

by nynx 5y ago

I hope this happens. The world needs more collaboration, especially in pandemic response.

anonnyj 5y ago

I too welcome fascism via vaccines.

ethbr0 5y ago

Of all the problems international cooperation could tackle, pandemics seem like they should be the easiest. Either you are dealing with one, or you aren't. Pretty stark contrast. So should make countries more comfortable ceding sovereignty, knowing it's going to be only in exceptional circumstances. Coupled with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has proven that even the most stringent border lockdowns fail in the face of highly transmissible, asymptomatic threats. Which makes this an "everyone" problem instead of a "head in the sand is okay" one. And finally, you're dealing with something that is generally agreed on: dead humans are bad and to be avoided. Godspeed to those trying to broker consensus.

golemotron 5y ago
> Either you are dealing with one, or you aren't. Pretty stark contrast. So should make countries more comfortable ceding sovereignty, knowing it's going to be only in exceptional circumstances. Without a hard metric it's a slippery slope and governments will not cede emergency powers. That's been the history of nearly all emergency powers. Ask yourself how long this pandemic will last and whether anyone will agree upon criteria for its end.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  I feel like this argument is still in bad faith. A co-worker last year was talking about how a mask mandate was the biggest violation of freedom ever in American history. So I kindly reminded my co-worker, internment camps for Japanese-americans were less of a violation? Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus during the civil war? Those are just two examples of many. These were all moves made by emergency powers that were...... given up by government when the situation ended.
  - golemotron 5y ago
    Emergency powers from the Patriot Act are still in effect. The problem this pandemic (and pandemics in general) is that there is no defined end and no one seems to be willing to create one. It is either a certain number of deaths per million or zero (eradication), which would put us in smallpox territory - about two centuries.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      "The fact that humans are the only reservoir for smallpox infection and that carriers did not exist, played a significant role in the eradication of smallpox." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication SARS-CoV-2 eradication is probably impossible.
      - golemotron 5y ago
        Yup. And that's why I would not want to see a treaty. Better to have nations acting independently of each other at the policy level, learning from each other's experiences. It's like a market where nations can explore different tradeoffs in how they declare an end or live with it.
        ethbr0 5y ago
        What if my tradeoff is "I will partially vaccinate everyone in my country and not perform any surveillance, tracking, or sequencing and stockpile any critical PPE and prohibit export of vaccines"? Absurd example, but that seems pretty harmful to every country with transportation links to me.
        golemotron 5y ago
        There's the concept of a border. They have liabilities but they have benefits too. We are too used to thinking of them as completely bad.
    - tcmart14 5y ago
jerkstate 5y ago
I really wish that we had a collective, global experience during the COVID-19 pandemic that made everyone trust that the national and international authorities had all of our best interests at heart and that they would implement controls fairly and judiciously with constant monitoring of efficacy and incremental improvement of methods, communication with honesty and transparency, and above all, respecting individuals. However, correct or incorrect, this has not been the experience of many during this pandemic. So there can be no surrender of sovereignty, personal or otherwise, from a large enough portion of the population, which would make any attempt at international control pointless at best, and tyrannical and horrific at worse. I truly hope that the governments of the world learn from their mistakes instead of blindly pushing forward with their current approach.
hanniabu 5y ago
> even the most stringent border lockdowns fail Except we never had a serious lockdown. Most businesses were still open because of loose terms of what is essential or finding loopholes like bars serving food with beer so they can be considered a restaurant and other ridiculous things.
- HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
  Real lockdowns have never been tried!
topkai22 5y ago
Point of order- The most stringent border lockdowns actually worked shockingly well, see New Zealand, for example. Also “you are either in a pandemic, or you aren’t” isn’t the important part of a response framework. The far more important part is preventing novel diseases from becoming a pandemic in the first place, even if they have the potential to be.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  New Zealand isn't very representative of the world, geographically and in effective population density. Coupled with the fact that it's a fundamentally unstable system to mate "highly transmissible pathogen" with "single layer of protection." There's a reason network security is migrating to zero trust, and it shares many parallels with pandemic modeling. Yes, border lockdowns will work if a country gets lucky. How long can they stay lucky? I'm also suspicious we can identify novel diseases fast enough (presumably in animal reservoirs) fast enough to be effective. There are too many unseen places on this planet, and pathogens evolve too quickly. Again, it only takes one. What should be boosted and universalized is disease surveillance. The patchwork (nationally and internationally) systems for stitching together sample -> testing -> result communication could bear a lot of improvement.
throwawaysea 5y ago
> Coupled with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has proven that even the most stringent border lockdowns fail in the face of highly transmissible, asymptomatic threats. Which makes this an "everyone" problem instead of a "head in the sand is okay" one. The “most stringent border lockdowns” didn’t happen, at least not in a timely way. The WHO is one reason why - even at the end of January 2020 they recommended against countries taking measures like border closures. The US travel ban didn’t get implemented until February 2020, and it still had various exemptions and tens of thousands of travelers from Hubei continued to pour into the US. What really should have happened is that China should have voluntarily shut down all their international ports in mid-December 2019. Unfortunately even though China shut down some domestic flights in January 2020, they didn’t shut international flights until March 2020 (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how-china-locked-down-internally-for-covid-19-but-pushed-foreign-travel/ https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...), following a call between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  in January 2020, nobody, including you thought this was going to go as far and as fast as it did. By then, very likely the cat was already out of the bag and a worldwide travel ban would have helped but would not have prevented the pandemic outright. Was this a mistake? Yes, because that decision violates the cautionary principle when dealing with novel diseases. The WHO was concerned with being found to be 'alarmist' but this time around that would have been the right position to take. Ironically had they done so and prevented the pandemic from spreading you would now be berating them for being such idiots that they caused us all to stop traveling for nothing in 2020, on account of the prevention paradox. And that makes you part of the problem: there is nothing that the WHO could have done that in your eyes would have been a proportional response, and when you are dealing with a novel pathogen mistakes are inevitable. A bit of restraint and some more thinking about this on your part would go a long way towards a more reasonable stance. But those that see the UN and the WHO as the root of all evil tend to do everything they can to avoid seeing reason, instead everything gets bent to the 'UN bad' talking point.
  - ethbr0 5y ago

systemvoltage 5y ago

It is worth refreshing the memory about how the WHO handled the initial stages of the pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c07MnRmJPcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c07MnRmJPcI While I am OK with science being wrong and then corrected, WHO has eroded public trust in staying objective and seeking truth.

hikergirl1234 5y ago

I would argue the opposite - the world needs less collaboration [coercion] in pandemic response. Having the WHO bludgeon countries into obeying standards set by a small committee of elites is an abuse of power waiting to happen.

AJ007 5y ago
From telling people it wasn’t airborne and they shouldn’t wear masks to saying no booster shots, their credibility is toast.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  All those points are taken out of context and are misleading.
- ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  Are they still saying it’s “impossible” the virus escaped from a Chinese weapons lab?
  - wesleywt 5y ago
    As a biologist looking at comments like these make me concerned that the general public has not learned its lesson on pandemics yet. It is far more concerning our destruction of the environment and our encroachment of habitats will lead to way more pandemics.
    - ed25519FUUU 5y ago
      I’m very much concerned with our government funding gof research in a foreign and adversarial weapons laboratory. Stopping that research would be a very important lesson to learn in this pandemic because it might actually be able to stop the next covid 19.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Yes, stopping such research is important. But it has nothing to do with COVID-19.