Or in January 2020 if it was contagious at all: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
There is no reason to believe the WHO was in possession of secret evidence of human-to-human transmission on that date, and they noted that it was entirely possible said evidence would emerge soon. It did shortly afterwards.
To put it in boring mathematical terms. If you have a bag filled with a million playing cards, and you inspect 1000 of them and they're all red, that's pretty good evidence that there aren't any black cards in the bag! But blind followers of the "absence of evidence" dogma would say "No it isn't! Just because you haven't found a black card yet doesn't say anything about whether there are any black cards at all." which is clearly nonsense.
The differentiating factor is have you looked?
I think it's reasonable for people to assume the WHO had actually investigated how people contracted covid (otherwise why bother tweeting?), in which case them saying "[we looked but] we couldn't find any evidence of human to human transmission" is clearly misleading.
> I think it's reasonable for people to assume the WHO had actually investigated how people contracted covid...
The tweet explicitly says "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities". The WHO team didn't get there until Jan 20. https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...
> otherwise why bother tweeting?
Because everyone was wondering at the time if they had the evidence yet.
> "[we looked but] we couldn't find any evidence of human to human transmission" is clearly misleading
That's not what they said, though.
Right it doesn't matter who looks, just that someone does. The Chinese looked! And they didn't find any evidence of human-to-human transmission. That is evidence that there isn't any. Not very compelling evidence but still evidence.
Again, this is a bit you're adding out of nowhere. The WHO did not make that claim in the tweet, and is quoted on the same day as that tweet saying evidence of human-to-transmission is likely to emerge.
People alleging human-to-human transmission of a pathogen should similarly present evidence of it. Within a week of that tweet, the WHO had said evidence in hand. (https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...)
Agreed, which is exactly why the topic should not be verboten.
Trump's suspension was for inciting violence.
One of the first Twitter accounts that was getting the straight facts out of Wuhan starting with late January was this lady [1], and because she had written for Epoch Times (among other things) of course meant that everything she was saying was potentially a big, fat lie meant to denigrate the Chinese. I was told as such by at least one user on this very website back then.