> 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🇨🇳.
They're not the CIA. They don't have an adversarial spy arm. They rely enormously on member nations' self-reporting, and they rely on those reports being honest. That clear evidence came later on doesn't mean the WHO had clear evidence at the time.
(And, as the saying goes, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Nothing in that tweet says "it can't spread"; it says "we can't solidly confirm it has been yet".)
Consider this imaginary scenario. Imagine a dead body is found in the street in front of your house. The dead person has multiple stab wounds, and there is a knife 20 feet away from the body.
Imagine you inform the police, but they come 2 hours later, and announce that they'll investigate the death. Then 2 days later they come and announce that they had no evidence that this was a murder. They also announced that staying in and locking your doors had shown to not stop serial killers and was counter productive.
Do you want such an investigative agency?
I would prefer if the police said something like this within 1 hours of arriving at the crime scene "the stab wound and a bloody knife indicate that this might be a murder. In order to stay safe, the residents should stay in, take precautions and lock their doors"
In case you didn't get what I referred to, there is no reason to doubt via a SARS like virus with respiratory sickness may be transmitted via air. Their default reaction should have been to assume the worst. Further, saying that travel restrictions do not stop a disease is a stupid statement to make. Specially when we see South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, NZ etc exterminate the virus.
WHO is to blame as much as individual governments.
> Van Kerkhove added, however, that human-to-human transmission would not be surprising given the WHO’s experience with SARS, MERS and other respiratory pathogens.
> Van Kerkhove’s message was not lost on reporters. The Telegraph in Britain headlined its article on the news conference: “WHO refuses to rule out human-to-human spread in China’s mystery coronavirus outbreak.”
Within a week (Jan 20) they'd confirmed the human-to-human transmission, too.
There were some people in local Chinese government that had preliminary indications that it might have transmitted H2H, but that data propagated in under a week after the tweet and it's not the WHO job to run an intelligence agency.
The misleading bit is to try to insist that what the WHO "meant" was something more akin to "it's not contagious, you can't catch it". NO ONE thinks a respiratory virus isn't contagious. The WHO quite clearly did not mean that. And yet we still have this argument months later because people like you steadfastly refuse to assume good faith (and bad writing) on the part of the WHO.
That, sorry, is politics. The WHO isn't your tribe, so they have to be skewered as enemies instead of interpreted as (however confuddled) people just trying to do their job under extreme time pressure and with limited information.
The WHO is clearly a very conservative and cautious organization. They won't do anything without really good studies and evidence. In this pandemic, though, this staunch stance gives a perception counter to lot of common sense and comes off as inaction.
Full timeline here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/17/trumps-fa...
Later that same day:
> Van Kerkhove added, however, that human-to-human transmission would not be surprising given the WHO’s experience with SARS, MERS and other respiratory pathogens.
> Van Kerkhove’s message was not lost on reporters. The Telegraph in Britain headlined its article on the news conference: “WHO refuses to rule out human-to-human spread in China’s mystery coronavirus outbreak.”
It only took a few more days for the evidence to emerge to the WHO's satisfaction, too. Widespread attempts to justify American officials' inaction in February/March based off the Jan 14 tweet are disingenuous.
> Jan. 19 WHO tweet: “An animal source seems the most likely primary source of this novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak, with some limited human-to-human transmission occurring between close contacts.”
> Jan. 20 WHO tweet: “It is now very clear from the latest information that there is at least some human-to-human transmission of #nCoV2019. Infections among health care workers strengthen the evidence for this.” At the time, there were only 222 confirmed cases in the world, including four deaths.
I was personally of the opinion that it was H2H at the time, but taking a few more days and having a complete confirmation was absolutely the right thing to do, given how we wasted that time anyways. There would have been no real upside and many downsides to such a decision for everyone.
That's going to need a cite.
But again, you're trying to ding them on a technicality about wording (you've just moved the goalposts from the usual "they said it wasn't contagious!" line) instead of applying what to most folks seems like the obvious interpretation.