On January 14, the WHO stated that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.”
You say it is "completely false" that people only believe is true by repetition, well WHO has a twitter account and their whole tweet is:
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
An wouldn't you know the WHOs completely false tweet was repeated 20k times.
Something tells me you haven't seen this alleged "preliminary investigation" report, but assuming you had, how do you know China didn't withhold information?
The WHO tweet is dated 14 January 2020, but the 1st case of Covid was identified in December 2019.
Chinese police forced Dr. Li to remove his comments about Covid19 from the internet on 3 January 2020. Hell Dr. Li returned to work and contracted the Virus himself on 8 January 2020 before the WHO tweet...so how did he get it if not person to person transmission?
So China had the information and conducted a cover up a full 2 weeks before the WHO tweet.
Can you explain why Dr. Li was forced by police to remove his social media posts and sign a confession? Can you explain whether Chinese authorities investigating how the virus was transmitted to Dr. Li before informing the WHO there was no clear evidence of person to person transmission?
Yes, in hindsight they should have listened to him, and back in January I was pissed off about this because it set China’s response back by about a week, but these days a week of wasted time sounds like an excellent performance compared to almost every other country.
It’s not about the political system. Imagine an American eye doctor posting on Facebook that Ebola was going around in NYC. They would definitely face immediate professional consequences — probably more than Li Wenliang did. My impression is that the full extent of the consequences he experienced was a stern talking to by the police, which is what you get here when pulled over for speeding.
If an ear doctor was finding a high number of ebola patients when treating ear conditions you would discount that information because it didn't come from someone study ebola?
The frontline doctors are the ones who will see the cases explode first.
Arresting him and saying it's nothing, he just had a stern talking to. Just like a parent educating child.
Was he putting other lives in jeopardy by sharing the truth or saving lives? Not really the same as speeding.
Let's be honest China didn't want to hurt it's imagine and thought they could cover this up. Big mistake, now they look dishonest and investment will be out not in China going forward.
You are just accepting that what Chinese Authorities told the WHO was true, yet you can't cite any actual written report or data supporting their "preliminary investigation" of the virus and human to human transmission.
>Li Wenliang had no expertise in the field, was going off very little information,
He was a Dr. in the hospital where the first covid-19 patients were identified and he obtained the information from the treating physician.
>Imagine an American eye doctor posting on Facebook that Ebola was going around in NYC. They would definitely face immediate professional consequences — probably more than Li Wenliang did. My impression is that the full extent of the consequences he experienced was a stern talking to by the police, which is what you get here when pulled over for speeding.
The US has freedom of speech, no police are going to force a US Doctor to take down a social media post and sign a confession/agreement not to post about a disease again. That is nothing like getting pulled over for speeding, and such a comparison is ridiculous, one is legitimate enforcement of traffic laws and the other is a violation of civil liberties.
Should they have not posted this at all?
>maybe acting on the best info at the time or acting as puppet for China
The WHO is supposed to be an independent international organization, so again the question is what kind of independent study or review did the WHO do before accepting the representations of Chinese authorities and repeating them to the World?
If the WHO did nothing but promoted a tweet at the request of Chinese authorities without an independent investigation into the merits of the tweet, then it seems clear they should not have posted it at all.
Either way the international community needs to know who these Chinese authorities were and an independent review of these preliminary investigations needs to be completed.