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> 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book? Hej Alina! Thanks for being open with having an economic interest in this topic being dragged out into the open again.
by wildmanx 4y ago
> 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book?
Hej Alina! Thanks for being open with having an economic interest in this topic being dragged out into the open again.
> It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.
It's not too surprising to me. International diplomacy works like this. With a more general picture in mind, specific topics often need to be swept under the rug. Otherwise international relations between any two countries would be constantly in shambles and we'd long have seen WW3, WW4 and WW5.
Note that I'm not advocating for any of this hush-hush. I'd also like to know what happened. But that's just not how international diplomacy works. In this particular case, if WHO wants continued support from China, then you need to carefully balance what and how you criticize. Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO or next time doesn't even tell anybody that a pandemic is coming for fear of being bullied for this kind of thing. I'm sure the responsible bodies (lab people) will learn their lesson and be more careful going forward. That's the only thing we can hope for nonetheless. It's unrealistic to think China would be punished and all their labs shut down. This won't happen.
- ayjchan 4y agoHi, My perspective is that, if the pandemic started due to the virus hunting program which was a very international collaboration (US, China, several European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern countries), then it's not really a China-specific thing. It could just be that China is so much further along in their virus discovery and characterization pipeline (as the scientific literature points out) that unfortunately they were the first to leak one of these pandemic level viruses either found in the wild and sent to the lab or created in the lab during the process of characterization. I don't think that a country should be singled out for punishment for having a lab accident (unless it can be demonstrated that they do not have proper biosafety protocols and accountability mechanisms in place; a case of reckless negligence). But I do think there should be new international agreements and penalties for suppressing information about an emerging outbreak, e.g., transmissibility of the virus, its genomic sequence, number of cases and geographic spread etc., and costing other countries time in preparing to respond to the outbreak.
- wildmanx 4y agoThanks, Alina. A well-balanced point of view.
- native_samples 4y ago"Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO" Are you sure? Is the goal of the WHO to generate accurate health advice, or to accumulate memberships?