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Comment by victorlin | Hacker News Reader

I've been watching COVID-19 very closely since 2019 Dec it, I also witnessed how WHO responses to this Pandemic. If you were me, you will notice that WHO tried very hard to please China, rather than taking people's health into consideration. Many things they did:

- Advice not to ban flight to China after China locked down hubei lockdown (yes, many country trust WHO, like Japan and Korea)

- Met and praised Xi many times, admire how wonderful they did

- Keep down playing how serious the problem can be, and didn't advice any action

And recently, China suddenly donate $20M to WHO

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-outbreak-china-t...

For more details, please watch this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5VGPYtbTk8

View on HN

Why would the WHO try to please China? It's an international organization. It's not a charity. It doesn't rely on donation. Its membership were to countries, it's operations were maintained based on membership dues. I find it revolting as the OP seems to be insinuating there were financial interest for WHO to please China, which is bizarre and outrageous based on how it's organized.

WHO does rely in large part on donations. See http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA72/A72_35-en.pdf page 82. It could certainly be argued that they have an interest in convincing China to boost the voluntary portion of its contribution to match that of some of the other nations on that list.

WHO has "assessed contribution", which is its lifeline upon which it relies. I'm not saying it doesn't accept donation. just that WHO doesn't need donations to survive. It's clearly shown in the pdf which you linked here that China doesn't even make it to the top 10 donor list. Donation from the United States comprised of 76% of WHO total voluntary contribution. Why would WHO risk angering its major donors and pleasing to one specific small donor? Even if finance were taken into consideration, it still doesn't make any sense.

* [Assessed Contribution - WHO]: https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/as...

* [US Impact - WHO]: https://www.who.int/about/planning-finance-and-accountabilit...

Because China threaten them. If they don't bend over backwards for them, China will accuse them of "Sinophobia" and being agents of the CIA all the rest.

If WHO doesn't want to please China, could you explain they follow China's will and block Taiwan all the time?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/22/china-health-coronaviru...

Yeah, right? why would they, hmmmmm, I am wondering

You are diving into conspiracy theories of the world's second largest economy and a massive multi-billion dollar pandemic over just $20 million?

its a very believable "conspiracy theory", given the circumstances.

This kind of Sinophobia is so unwarranted -- China has done the best to control this disease outside of maybe S. Korea.

Suggesting the Who is partial to China is not sinophobia.

Sorry to say that, but Taiwan did the best to control it

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/what-taiwan-can-t...

See it yourself, not China. They hide data from the world, beat people up on street. How come that now becomes a model for the world? Taiwan is a free country, and yet they did a great job there.

Can’t read without enabling trackers/fingerprinting

Taiwan has not even been permitted membership to the WHO and is excluded from WHO participation. Maybe it was Taiwan that the WHO was praising when they were talking of China.

What's Sinophobic about this?

Look at the YouTube channel they linked.

People who are so "sinophobic" that they spent their best years in china, learning the language, marrying locals, and creating multiple documentaries about Chinese culture, and only left China because the recent xenophobia of China has become too much for them to continue living there.

I disagree. I haven't lived in China (for more than two months at a time), but traveled there multiple times, which was an eye-opening experience. I've met several foreigners living in China, some of them since before 2010. There is no raise in xenophobia according to those people.

The clickbait that these two Youtubers spread on their channels creates a very, very biased picture of China, and Chinese society (to the negative). Things are blown out of proportion or presented with misleading or no context. Even when they pretend to make a positive video about China, they can't help but add a few dismissive comments here and there.

All of the aforementioned people I know dislike their content, because they feel it misrepresents China as a whole.

I could go on about how and why I think these two guys are toxic, but the gist of it is that I actually used to watch their channel regularly before they became full-time youtubers, which was a turning point. Over the following 6-12 months their content slowly became more clickbaity and generally negative towards China. But I guess once you depend on youtube financially, you simply make videos that get the most clicks. Their comment section slowly turned from "sometimes filled with Chinese trolls and otherwise cool people" to a cesspool of people living in their echo chamber of "murica is awesome, teh commies are evil", and obviously still a lot of Chinese trolls.

Their content doesn't help to get insight into China. It helps you to strengthen the bubble you live in.

I have followed ADVChina for quite some time. The creators provide a unique lens into Chinese culture that is hard to find elsewhere. They are very open about talking about Chinese culture and why it is the way it is. They talk about what they like and don't like about the culture but not in a racist way. The titles of their Youtube videos are click-baity, but the content is informative.

What they say in the channel are all true, they have been traveling in China and living there for long time, they married Chinese wife. If you really look closely, you will notice that they pointed out many problems in China, which I don't think it's Sinophobia. If you point out problems in any country makes you something phobia, then there's no freedom of speech....

Vietnam has done similarly well too. China deserves some blame for not having investigated complaints seriously and allowing it to have spread at least for a month before the alarm bells were rung.

I think most people can agree that no one country has done a stellar job (including the US) to contain and mitigate the virus but given that China was the first to be hit, it gets a larger share of the blame for letting it spread to the rest of the world. If you look at the timeline of the events that transpired in China since December [1], it shows a clear pattern of ignorance and favoring politics over public health. You know things have gone completely wrong when you decide to arrest doctors that have called out the disease. Anybody that says "China has done the best to control this disease" is either a CCP shill or massively uninformed or misled by propaganda. Remember, the only news we get out of China comes from state-sanctioned media.

[1] https://wuhanmemo.com/?page_id=230929

You've been using HN repeatedly for nationalistic flamewar, which is not a legit use of the site. We've had to ask you more than once to stop doing this since long before Covid-19. Please stop now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: turns out you've been using HN pretty much exclusively for that. That is a bannable offense as the site guidelines make clear. I'm not going to ban you now, but if you don't stop then we will.

> no one country has done a stellar job

Taiwan have done a stellar job. Pre-prepared, acted quickly (starting on 31st of Dec), and have got the results to show they were doing it right. For more information, see: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689

Edit: This also shows up the lie that China’s suppression of information was the critical factor in delaying everyone’s actions: Taiwan had the information and acted, it is just that other countries chose not to act on the information they had. Li Wenliang (one of the whistleblower doctors) on 30 December he “sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection. Four days later he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter.”

Yes, I noticed too that Taiwan did an amazing job at protecting its citizens. It’s even more remarkable because of how close geographically, culturally and economically it is to China.

Hows South Korea doing? I saw they did a lot of tests compared to the rest of us.

They seem to be getting things under control. [0]

[0] https://mackuba.eu/corona/#south_korea

Thanks fort he link, seems well researched, even though it has a clear anti China bias.

China has also silenced those who detected it in early stages. China should pay a dear price for doing so as that is the main reason it got out of control. Stay safe folks!

Republic of China (Taiwan) is ironically very lucky to be excluded from WHO. They acted on their own accord on made all the right decisions.

What does being excluded from the WHO have to do with that?

You want visas to go into china and research a pandemic? This is how it is done. Not by throwing people under the bus, but by maintaining a very narrow bandwidth of comment and showing appreciation to the powers that be, for allowing you to enter the country and go about your business. I appreciate Xi Jinping and other chinese official's efforts to contain the disease and assist the WHO on their research mission. That's all I have to say about that.

Yes, I've been saying this from the start as well. Also note that they used China's severely misleading statistics from day 1 with no disclaimer. The WHO is incompetent and/or corrupt.

In what way were China's statistics severely misleading. For a long time, they reported lab-confirmed cases and were upfront that this was limited by the amount of tests they could perform. In addition, they reported how many people were tested and how many tests were still being processed.

Today in the US, the US is reporting only lab-confirmed cases. They are also upfront that this is limited by the amount of tests they can perform. Unlike China, the US is __not__ reporting how many people are tested or how many tests are being processed. They are also not upfront about the fact that testing is severely limited by a very strict policy on who to test.

I'll take China's statistics (which I've not seen to be misleading) over the US's complete censoring of any information about the outbreak, and the CDC preventing people from getting testing.

At this point, all flights from the US should be terminated. Your government is a danger to your own country and to the world.

Many feel the same way. There's a petition with almost 500k signers calling for the WHO Director General's resignation: https://www.change.org/p/united-nations-call-for-the-resigna...

Random people signing an internet petition is not cause to remove an international health expert. The only legitimate votes could come from doctors or foreign affairs/other experts

You mean the same foreign affairs experts that look the other way at human rights violations and other massive crime for the sake of politics?

No thanks.

Well, NYT also accused him a few years ago of covering up 3 Cholera outbreaks in his home country of Ethiopia.

Given the display across the world right now I don't know if the experts are that much more informed than the collective wisdom of online society at this point, at least for this matter.

The collective wisdom of some online societies is saying that Covid is being played up in a conspiracy to lose Trump an election. We should be skeptical or online wisdom

Wer zahlt, schafft an. It's not as if they can just tell the Chinese to fuck off, is it?

They have to stay on the good side of the Chinese, or they will get kicked out.

This is a lot of media. Bizarrely no skepticism, just writing articles matter of factly using dubious (or at the very least opaque/unverifiable) figures from foreign governments.

And a surprising lack of reporting on the dozens of side channel leaks from China - videos of dead bodies, videos from leakers including the young doctor who was admonished and succumbed to the disease...

Yeah a lot of it was rumor and hard to verify but...nothing? You'd almost start to wonder whether our journalists were cooperating with the Chinese government or something in censoring everything. I struggle to come up with a legitimate excuse other than total incompetence. It was all over the internet and a lot of it (first hand accounts from Chinese citizens within China) would have been reasonably easy to verify for a journalist who knew a Chinese speaker.

WHO is an organization with no real power; it was necessary to kiss China's ass so that they could gain access to the country and get early data on the virus. The alternative was that the rest of the world would have had to rely solely on the manipulated Chinese stats.

Why is gaining access a good idea? If China's being dishonest WHO should just recommend zero travel from/to China and let them stew in it -- they can manipulate their stats internally all they want.

They need access because they need the data.

Suppose the WHO did recommend a zero travel ban from/to China, what do you think would happen?

Nothing would have changed. It's still in the hands of the politicians in those countries to enact it. And let's be fair, in each country there's at least one politician in the parliament, congress,... that mocked the current, mild, response to the outbreak. Some said they would, or did in fact, defy quarantine rules to stop spreading the disease.

Countries are also running out of reagents to test for this virus so analysis of the situation is already going to be complex. If China is being dishonest, they'll see it in the data. If country X or Y are dishonest in reporting figures about infection, mortality rates and what not, they will also see it.

To summarize and put it bluntly:

1) I doubt China was the only superpower on the planet that used political force on the WHO to change their messaging.

2) The virus is new and currently raw data in any form is more important than issuing a medical recommendation that will be ignored because of country specific politics.

>I doubt China was the only superpower on the planet that used political force on the WHO to change their messaging

China is the only superpower who prioritizes "saving face" over world health. Nobody else would be stupid enough to falsify health data in the face of a pandemic to make themselves look better.

Otherwise, yeah, you have a point about having data about a new disease. But if we can't trust China to provide accurate data anyway, what did we gain? Arguably, the entire reason we saw such a delayed international response to the outbreak outside of China was their "only 300 infected! whoops it's actually 5k lol" campaign.

> China is the only superpower who prioritizes "saving face" over world health. Nobody else would be stupid enough to falsify health data in the face of a pandemic to make themselves look better.

The US has criminally undertested and is actively hiding information (classifying meetings) by order of the current administration.

Please remember that "China" is not one person, and that the dishonest actions of some in their government should not be used to condemn thousands of innocent others to danger or death.

So we should, instead, condemn the rest of the world? How many lives could have been saved if travel to China was stopped months ago?

Instead thousands of innocents not in China have been condemned to danger or death. Last I checked, there are way more people not in China than in China. The classic trolley car problem would have made the call easy: seal off China.

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