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Comment by zknz | Hacker News Reader

That's not a denial. It's a we have yet to confirm.

It may not have explicitly stated that there was no human to human transmission, but that was strongly suggestive that there wasn’t.

The default assumption should be, that a virus affecting hundreds of people already, could be contagious. Suggesting otherwise, with no reasonable evidence to support such, is deliberately obfuscating if not deliberately misleading. There was absolutely no reason to make such a statement other than to parrot without question what was being reported by the PRC.

Considering Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus received support from the PRC in his candidacy for leadership of the WHO, and the significant ties between his home country of Ethiopia and the PRC, I’m skeptical that it was just absolute ignorance without any political influence or bias that prompted such a statement.

But surely the prudent, cautious way of wording a non-denial would be "no clear evidence of the impossibility of human-to-human transmission"?

And how do you go about testing that hypothesis except for placing infected people next to uninfected people and watching for them to become infected?

Their phrasing is correct and so is their methodology.

That’s totally true, but I don’t think it should be controversial to say that the WHO lied by omission, and that their statement was intentionally intended to convince countries _not_ to lock down.

"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement. They never ever said "okay, this definitely isn't transmissible, everybody can ignore it". They said in the early stages that it was too soon to be sure. All the other tweets from this period are saying the same thing: something might be coming, so countries should prepare.

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