The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics
text.npr.org
text.npr.org
By definition, these groups are political though. Almost none of them conduct their own studies, relying almost entirely on what the manufacturers provide them. And all of them have limited practical ability and experience to actually enforce their guidelines. What are they are exceptionally good at though is reviewing submitted trials and monitoring for adverse effects. Some people get hurt when dangerous products are given pre-approval / full-approval, but this is mitigated by quick recalls / banning.
So to your question, political bodies likes the FDA's are a benefit to the greater populace and by extension the medical community. Keeping the obvious scams and harmful products out of general reach from the population is a pretty clear positive.
Yes, so that the supplements industry can run amok on an unsuspecting public. No really, that's just what we need, especially now.
It’s (2) that is the problem. With informed consent, you should be allowed to put whatever you want in your body without going to jail. It’s your body.
Actually sample testing new and existing products against guidelines as well as being an active participant in trials would go a long way towards moving the FDA from being "paper-pushers" towards a more hands-on regulatory body.
They should also have enough expertise in-house to not rely on lobbists and industry experts for new regulations, when these outside forces by nature have competing interests.
Straight abolishing any part of it without proposing a substitute doesn't strike me as being in the best interests of society.
> They also point to conflicts over the lack of transparency and information sharing, particularly by China.
Right. The problem is not the actual lack of transparency but rather "conflicts over the lack of transparency." And no, I do not allow that NPR writers are somehow oblivious to the distinction; they mean exactly what is written.
> Some countries were accused of hoarding of medical supplies.
WHO shall decide how little medical supply the US is allowed to buy or keep.
> Then when vaccines were finally developed, poorer nations have complained that they weren't shared equitably.
WHO shall decide how long the US is made to wait for vaccine.
> A final concern, the experts say: The global response to the crisis is led by an underfunded World Health Organization that has no power to force any nation to do anything.
Give WHO more money. Give WHO more power. No assurances that performance will be any less abysmal are to be expected.
Should make a nice photo op when Biden signs it.
It seems to be that the intellectual property is more pertinent than the total export volume to "poorer nations."
In my limited experience, the WHO, like many NGOs/multi-lateral bodies, is full of intelligent, motivated people dedicated to their mission. Those people aren’t motivated by money, but are motivated by prestige and recognition. China pulled those levers well for the last several years, the US didn’t, but i don’t know of a fundamental reason why the US can’t return to its traditional place of influence if it tries.
Should the US (or China) sign a multi lateral treaty requiring it to deliver vaccines and other health resources to more vulnerable citizens of other countries ahead of some or all of its own citizens? I don’t know. Is the WHO worth having around, even in a flawed or even semi-hostile state? Yes.
> Flawed, but better than not having a WHO. IMO China’s influence is more because they did a great job at committing hard to diplomacy and working relationships at WHO at the exact same time the US pulled away. It turns out diplomacy and leadership matter.
Yeah, exactly. It's weird, but for things like this it seems the complainers often actually cause the things they complain about (e.g. create a void, then complain when a competitor fills that void). It's understandable because this stuff is often hard to perceive at a general-interest level, but that doesn't excuse it.
This seems completely revisionist to me. You really think China’s influence was justified in January and February 2020? This is before Trump first criticized the WHO (early April 2020). The US was funding 15% of the WHO’s overall budget, more than twice as much as the next nearest country (the UK), and more than 70x what China funded. What exact levers did China pull “for the last several years” that the US didn’t? It seems to me like the US did far more to support the WHO than anyone else.
They also did good, like getting PCR testing available worldwide on a compressed timescale. But let’s not pretend that the good didn’t come with a healthy helping of truly terrible decisions along the way. Enough to make some healthy skepticism seem prudent.
Except they didn't. Enough countries managed to largely contain covid pre-delta based on WHO information that was provide by PRC. Information that was timely relative to how slow many countres implemented basic epidemiologic containment strategies after the fact. Some despite having capability to implement such strategies, and many who unfortunately never had the capability but simply never had a chance considering covid spread before PRC detection. WHO didn't do perfectly, but they did enough considering circumstances. As for influence, PRC influence is commiserate relative to geopolitical power - there isn't a feasible global governance structure where PRC interests won't be accounted for. Otherwise PRC wouldn't have been incentivized to handle covid relatively responsibly compared to SARS.
If the CCP spent more time being open and honest and less time arresting people for talking about covid and documenting it this would probably have ended up better than they are now.
Even now the CCP propaganda is still trying to convince Twitter and Facebook users that covid started with deer in the US.
>Even now the CCP propaganda is still trying to convince Twitter and Facebook users that covid started with deer in the US.
And? Of course CCP is going to tit-for-tat origin propaganda started by US. This treaty will no doubt attempt tackle the politicization of pandemics in the future, but likely to no avail.
NZ and Taiwan didn't follow WHO in the early days. Going against all the recommendations of the WHO of not using masks, not closing boarders, not locking down. And both countries did super well at controlling the pandemic.
> CCP quarantined entire province of Wuhan, they did more than enough to buy time for any country with capability to execute competent containment.
The CCP welded people into their apartments, boxed them up in metal boxes and shipped them off to quarentine, dragged them out of their homes. The whole time lying about the number of cases, and the seriousness. They shut down domestic travel and stopped incoming international flights. But allowed outgoing international flights while calling anyone who stopped flights from China racist.
> And? Of course CCP is going to tit-for-tat origin propaganda started by US.
There was no propaganda started by the US. The lab theory started in Asia in the Janurary. It wasn't until the US/Trump mentioned it that it got shutdown as a conspiracy by Trump.
They followed the basic test/trace/isolate advocated by WHO seriously, mask was additional prevention layer from basic common sense that Asians including PRC already were doing. BTW PRC was also advocating mask wearing in their "propaganda". TW itself got a chance to act early due to warning by PRC doctors due to cross strait connections. Same info avail to west via backchannels. Again, import case statistics from TW/NZ demonstrated PRC exported less than a few hundred cases to these places TOTAL, which would have been completely managable with a competent isolation system. The entire time they had continous repatriation flights from PRC, as did many other countries that handled covid well directly as result of CCP handling covid well.
> The whole time lying about the number of cases, and the seriousness.
Yet you list actions of how CCP took covid MORE seriously then and now than basically anyone else. Again import case statistics from "transparent" nations demonstrated early covid numbers in Wuhan/Hubei were completely managable -TW,SK,Singapore,AU,NZ,CA all released import case stats daily, and PRC essentially stopped exporting cases a few cases after Hubei lockdown. There's a reason vast number of patient zero and import cases in most of the world came from western countries who didn't take epidemic prevention seriously. PRC did her part, include blocking outbound flight early, except repatriation flights, because you know, they can't keep foreign citizens trapped in country. And the countries that didn't take screening fucked themselves, i.e. countries that just took quarantine theatre temperature checks while letting folks go home with little followup. Their profound lack of seriousness turned a managable situation unmanagable.
> There was no propaganda started by the US.
Politicized by Tom Cotton and republican peers in early Feburary i.e. endorsed by US political establishment before PRC formally responded with Fort Detrick campaign. Doesn't matter how MSM treat it as conspiracy, it was formal propaganda position drive initiated by republicans, supported at the highest level of office, including campaigns by lying Pompeo.
No. TW started inspecting flights from Wuhan before the WHO even did anything. NZ blocked inbound flights while the WHO was figuring out what to do.
> TW itself got a chance to act early due to warning by PRC doctors due to cross strait connections.
No. Taiwan heard whispers of SARS/Unknown pneumonia and reacted accordingly.
> Again, import case statistics from TW/NZ demonstrated PRC exported less than a few hundred cases to these places TOTAL
No. NZ closed its border to China in Feb. TW closed its border for flights from Wuhan. China stopped domestic flights from Wuhan but continued to allow flights out of Wuhan. This has nothing to do with "they can't keep foreign citizens trapped in country", because 1) they can and 2) they do.
> Yet you list actions of how CCP took covid MORE seriously then and now than basically anyone else.
So you agree that welding people into their apartments is a good approach to controlling the virus?
> Politicized by Tom Cotton and republican peers in early Feburary
It was a valid theory, and still is. Was never a conspiracy theory to anyone but the left. While nothing from the PRC has been anything other than propaganda conspiracy theory. The lab leak theory should have been taken seriously in the beginning when it was theorized at the beginning of Jan.
>1) they can and 2) they do
For breaking PRC laws, not epidemic prevention. At end of day, countries wanted to repatriate and PRC obliged. It's asinine to suggest PRC can with hold foreign nationals, as if that won't spark a completely different kind of outrage. Obviously said criminals who broke PRC laws weren't repatriated. TW citizens from Wuhan was repatriated via rail to Shanghai. TW CDC had up to date release of repatriation flights and positives. Up till Aprial, TW repatraitaed about ~1000 out of Wuhan with 1 testing positive on an early Feburary flight. That's it. Because Hubei lock down was that effective.
> good approach to controlling the virus
Covid-0 strategy is probably the right one for PRC. More importantly it demonstrates containing covid was absolutely a viable. But other relatively milder intervention stratgies also possible as seen in other successful countries that adhered to basic WHO guidelines who didn't resort to PRC tier interventions. They were just slightly less successful. Even TW response barely ranks well when measured against other PRC provinces. Taking pandemic response seriously is correlated to serious results should not be shocking.
> was a valid theory
About as valid as Fort Detrick at the time (and now). Point is early lab leak propaganda was just that, propaganda designed to policized for Sino-US rivalry when origin tracing hasn't even begun and hampered subsequent efforts. PRC position has always been to let science handle origin tracing which in terms of propaganda is tame. Reality apart from delays around two-sessions in Jan PRC has provided more than enough info and signals for most serious actors to contain covid19 depite virus already spreading abroad prior to two-sessions or detection of market cluster. Or that there's still zero indication covid19 originated in PRC vs PRC discovering first cluster. Lot's of valid theories out there, but what gets pushed by whom and when and for what purpose is how things get politicized and what treaty is designed to mitigate.
At the end of the day CCP + WHO did fine, because those that took them seriously (like actually seriously) did Ok. Those that didn't, burned and have been looking for escape goats to their own failure.
1. They blindly repeated the CCP’s claims that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t seem to exhibit human to human transmission, as late as mid-January 2020. Remember, there were widespread reports of a pneuomonia-like illness in Wuhan in December. We later learned that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized as early as November. China’s own formal notice to WHO of the outbreak was done at the end of December. Around a week after the WHO provided broken guidance, China publicly announced that there is human to human transmission, and it still took the WHO a week past that to correct their guidance. I just don’t see how the WHO could possibly provide such broken guidance so late and for so long.
2. They allowed the CCP to escape accountability for over a year with their site visit in early 2021. I know they can’t force their way in and rely on UN member states for “power” but I feel like they were willing to happily ignore the possibility of a lab leak instead of pushing hard for a timely investigation on site (applying pressure publicly and seeking help from other nations). After their brief site visit in 2021, Tedros (head of WHO) seemed very ready to rule out a lab leak, and only a small set of brave scientists and investigative journalists have allowed this theory to return to legitimacy and receive the attention it deserves despite being shouted down by the “trust the science” crowd.
3. The WHO has not used their authority/weight as an institution in helpful ways. For example, they have pushed back against travel bans and other such measures that would at least buy countries time. At the end of January 2020, Tedros literally said there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade”. More recently, the WHO has repeatedly claimed that countries seeking to protect their own people first are “hoarding” vaccines, which is absurd.
4. The WHO seems to be very deeply political. Whether it is about sparing the CCP from scrutiny or following “woke” protocol on how to name viruses and variants, they simply don’t feel like a neutral organization. The phrase “trust the science” is so overused that it is essentially meaningless, but the WHO is one of those very organizations that make me think that what we have come to call “science” is very prone to political corruption. They also seem to regularly put China’s interests ahead of the US, despite the US providing 15% of the WHO’s funding (China funds 0.21%).
5. There are other issues with WHO from before COVID. They were simply not as apparent since they didn’t affect Americans. Look at the 2014 Ebola outbreak and how the WHO handled it - by their own admission, they were completely incompetent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_virus_ep...).
That's pretty easy to criticize from the sidelines. At the same time: if the pandemic had been much milder you would be here ranting about how the WHO got it all wrong again and they cried wolf for no particular reason if only to grab more power, make money for big pharma with unused vaccines and managed to scare us all for nothing.
They can't do it right, it's always going to be too much or too little, and it's always the same groups complaining about this.
The first 6 months the WHO basically lied to everyone.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?s=21
We knew it was transmissible in December of 2019.
They are incompetent.
- what is their mission?
- how are they funded?
- how are they staffed?
- what is their scope?
- what happens if you don't comply?
- how do they measure success?
- what meaningful actions have they taken during the pandemic and in the past that has made the world a better place than if they didn't exist at all?
In general I understand the case for the "one world health" approach, but my anti-authoritarian instinct is wary of building global governing institutions that bypass democratic representation.
I also want to point out to the people that complain about the Chinese influence .. it's disingenuous to ignore that the WHO was conceived as an extension of USA global influence, and has operated that way for decades. No one sounds that alarm as long as its "their guy" in charge.
This was famously made public by the Belarusian president in September:
> In this news, Lukashenko did not state that the IMF offered him a bribe. He only explained that, as a condition of providing Covid-19 emergency funds, the IMF demanded the implementation of quarantine, isolation, and curfews.
That quote is from a fact check trying to debunk conspiracy theories about the IMF: https://cekfakta.tempo.co/fakta/1008/fakta-atau-hoaks-benark...
I believe it is entirely reasonable to condition pandemic funds on taking actions against the pandemic.
Also I believe there are many reasons to deny foreign funds to the Belarus of today.
You think it's okay for NGOs to create a catastrophic economic situation causing many nation's markets to become dependent on relief funding, then having said NGOs put agenda focused conditions on the relief they provide? You don't see this as a common strategy of extortion?
I feel like you'd rationalize business "security" provided by the mafia as something good if saying otherwise conflicted with your worldview in some way. Next you'll buy into a Ponzi scheme and start extolling the virtues of pyramidal finance structures.
Thank you for the mind reading, the fortune telling, the portrait you have drawn. Your clairvoyance knows no limmits. Should I expect a biography next?
Pandemics are - by definition - a global problem and trying to solve these with local countermeasures (aka, take care of the West and forget about the rest) isn't going to work: until such a thing is under control everywhere it might as well not be under control anywhere.
The current mess is there to a large degree because countries have been ignoring the WHO, not because they followed the WHO and their advice turned out to be nonsense.
If anything the WHO should have been more strict in their initial reading of the situation and I'm pretty sure that they have learned their lesson, but the prevention paradox is real and if they had cried 'wolf' too early they would have been abused by the same people that now claim that they messed up because they didn't react soon enough and strong enough.
From day #1 the WHO has been arguing for strong countermeasures rather than to slow-walk it to see how bad it was going to get because time lost will not be won back during a pandemic.
WHO Press briefing March 13th 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqRHH6e-y6I
The WHO did not fail us, but politicians certainly did.
Second, nations exist to serve their populations. Think xenophobia and racism are bad now? Wait until it’s life or death and a decision is now directly attributable to the deaths of those around you.
“Sorry Aunt Edna, you have to die. A factory worker in Mexico got your vaccine so they can make cars for an American company.”
The WHO is politically controlled by China and that’s not going away. Any proposal to let the WHO have sovereignty over the USA in any form, this is DOA. Without USA, what’s the point?
That said, maybe there are common grounds or infrastructure that can be build collectively, similar to the space station that everyone funds and benefits from in a pre agreed upon way.
The nonsense in this thread is really painful to read. No, the WHO is not politically controlled by China.
China spent ages blocking Taiwan from the discussion and succeeded as the WHO had to appease the CCP.
Seems like chinas influence on the WHO is a lot.
Only very few countries tried to do this (with specifically calling this a Chinese Virus) but that did quite a bit of damage to the WHOs mission of trying to help curb the pandemic.
You can accuse the WHO of a lot of things (for instance: not calling a pandemic early enough and not being far more pro-active in calling for governments to curb the spread), but the problem there is that they can't sound the alarm too often too early before people will start to ignore them, which is just one more variation of the prevention paradox.
I'm not sure if I agree that they did or didn't call it early enough. But lying to the public is what rubs me the wrong way. The WHO should not contain any politics, but that's exactly what it has done the entire time. They spent more time pandering to the CCP than being a /World Health Organization/.
While china was telling the world it's racist for calling it the Wuhan Virus or Wuhan Flu, it's own state run media was continuing to call it that despite the WHO giving it a name.
When we knew it was human transmissible, the WHO was parroting the CCP telling us it's not. When countries were stopping flights. The WHO was telling everyone not to stop flights. China was stopping flights while telling America it's racist for stopping flights.
At some point we need to ignore the child throwing its toys out of the cot and focus on the actual issue.
Where do you even get this nonsense? Seriously, do you really believe that the WHO spent more time pandering to the CCP than to being a World Health Organization? If you do then I am really at a loss on how to get you out of that because it is so far from what I've seen that I suspect you are looking at this through some kind of lens that magnifies the relatively insignificant first two weeks or so relative to the remainder of what is now almost two years of non-stop effort to help curb this pandemic.
They certainly aren't perfect, but at least they are trying and the bulk of the people that are - unsuccessfully - trying to link this to some kind of shadowy Chinese control are typically found on the extremes of the spectrum trying hard to assign blame for all this rather than to get it resolved.
This was simply because at that time there wasn't any evidence to the contrary, which, unfortunately turned out to be not true once more evidence came out.
You know what? We still don't have the whole picture, and we will still come to conclusions that hindsight will tell us is wrong.
But that doesn't mean you need to attribute all of that to malice or control by the Chinese.
For one you are trying to prove a negative, for another, you are asking others to prove a negative, when in fact it should be the opposite: there should be some pretty hard proof before a lab leak hypothesis would even rise to the same level of consideration that a zoonotic jump (which is default) should be given. Absent such evidence you can safely discard it, and if and when such (non circumstantial) evidence does surface it would be a good time to get seriously upset about it. But until then it is a complete non-issue, except in those places that seem to go out of their way to make this a 'China has tried to destroy the world and then tried to cover it up' story, none of which seems to match the available evidence. That said, the Chinese have not made their own story any better with their initial handling of the pandemic and the degree to which they were transparent with the data that they must have already had at their disposal. But that is nothing that can't be explained by their usual reluctance to own up to fuck-ups. Other countries (the Russian Federation, and the United States, India and plenty of others besides) have done similar if not worse things, it seems to be a political reflex: try to squelch the problem in an attempt to avoid blame. This of course doesn't work and only makes things worse.
I work and live in DC and that’s a forgone conclusion here.
Since I can’t ask you for evidence of China NOT controlling the WHO, maybe I can put it to HN:
Does anybody have a good article for this person to read about China and the WHO?
Maybe google “WHO China Influence”. There are thousands of articles.
Oh ok, that makes it true then.
> Does anybody have a good article for this person to read about China and the WHO?
How about you go and try to educate yourself a bit about what the WHO actually is and how it is governed before making a fool of yourself like this? The only circles where people really believe that the United Nations and the WHO are run by the Chinese are those that you probably don't want to be associated with.
What do you say to articles like this one?
"Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern, ..."
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-h...
If you have a problem with that you should probably lay it at the feet of the Chinese government officials that did that. But Adhanom did visit and did in fact get the Chinese to cooperate.
The Taiwan/China issue is obviously a very sensitive one to the Chinese and this has muddied the waters, as has - probably - an initial attempt by China to wipe this under the carpet. The end result is that the pandemic has probably become worse than it could have been but:
- Subsequent events, even after much more knowledge had been gathered by the West did not lead to substantially different policies in Western countries, if anything the countermeasures were - and still are - too late and too lax.
- The WHO does appear to have learned some lessons from this pandemic.
- The prevention paradox is real: if the WHO had sounded a massive alarm early on and had been found to be wrong then they would have been hard pressed to do this again at some point in the future because everybody would have called them the boy that cried wolf. But this time there was a wolf, and this time wasn't helped by the previous times that WHO raised the alarm and no pandemic at a massive scale occurred. Note that it doesn't really matter whether we prevented it successfully or whether it would have fizzled out.
- Finally, it is super easy to criticize from the sidelines, I think the WHO has a nearly impossible mission, to get a very large number of countries to collaborate in spite of a whole raft of political complications, egos and other bullshit. Given that they did a commendable job, I hope they will put the lessons learned to good effect, they did more than any single government in the world to help combat this pandemic.
But ultimately, that is not a WHO problem, but a UN problem (parent of the WHO) and one that we will sooner or later have to take care of. Similar nonsense surrounds various other countries in the world with everybody tiptoeing around the problem.
This is explicitly false. The WHO did not argue for strong countermeasures from “day #1”. They didn’t even acknowledge human to human transmission until late January 2020 (https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1219478547644813312?s=20 ). Here they are recommending against the general use of masks at the end of January 2020. (https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1269003/retrieve). Here’s Tedros himself saying travel bans are not needed in February 2020 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...). The WHO only declared a pandemic in March 2020, apparently because they thought such a declaration would cause governments and individuals to give up (https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/who-declares-the-coronav...). All this after Taiwan initially warned the WHO in December 2019 (https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...).
The WHO absolutely did fail us and your claimed narrative is false.
The information that they had was flawed and incomplete, which is enough to understand the degree to which they felt the need to sound the alarm.
The only people who are rabidly blaming the WHO for 'failing us' are the ones that would like to distract from the people the really failed us: the politicians that decided to ignore the information coming out of the WHO and that refused to act on it. Those governments that went a step further and played it safe did considerably better, but do note that those very same groups that are blaming the WHO are claiming that these countries only managed to do so by curbing people's freedoms, by abusing their population and so on.
On another note, the people who continuously talk about 'narratives' tend to be the ones that are most invested in sowing chaos and dissent as well as distrust in those authorities working hard to help us get out of this. The practical upshot of this is that you may succeed in undermining the sentiment that the WHO is a useful organization but that will not change the facts on the ground, and the isolationism that this is closely related to tends to be strongly associated with people who would like to reduce the world to little fiefdoms without such niceties as the UN, the WHO, the International Criminal Court etc. Be careful whose water you carry.
Either you are dealing with one, or you aren't. Pretty stark contrast. So should make countries more comfortable ceding sovereignty, knowing it's going to be only in exceptional circumstances.
Coupled with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has proven that even the most stringent border lockdowns fail in the face of highly transmissible, asymptomatic threats. Which makes this an "everyone" problem instead of a "head in the sand is okay" one.
And finally, you're dealing with something that is generally agreed on: dead humans are bad and to be avoided.
Godspeed to those trying to broker consensus.
Without a hard metric it's a slippery slope and governments will not cede emergency powers. That's been the history of nearly all emergency powers. Ask yourself how long this pandemic will last and whether anyone will agree upon criteria for its end.
The problem this pandemic (and pandemics in general) is that there is no defined end and no one seems to be willing to create one. It is either a certain number of deaths per million or zero (eradication), which would put us in smallpox territory - about two centuries.
SARS-CoV-2 eradication is probably impossible.
Absurd example, but that seems pretty harmful to every country with transportation links to me.
However, correct or incorrect, this has not been the experience of many during this pandemic. So there can be no surrender of sovereignty, personal or otherwise, from a large enough portion of the population, which would make any attempt at international control pointless at best, and tyrannical and horrific at worse.
I truly hope that the governments of the world learn from their mistakes instead of blindly pushing forward with their current approach.
Except we never had a serious lockdown. Most businesses were still open because of loose terms of what is essential or finding loopholes like bars serving food with beer so they can be considered a restaurant and other ridiculous things.
Also “you are either in a pandemic, or you aren’t” isn’t the important part of a response framework. The far more important part is preventing novel diseases from becoming a pandemic in the first place, even if they have the potential to be.
Coupled with the fact that it's a fundamentally unstable system to mate "highly transmissible pathogen" with "single layer of protection." There's a reason network security is migrating to zero trust, and it shares many parallels with pandemic modeling.
Yes, border lockdowns will work if a country gets lucky. How long can they stay lucky?
I'm also suspicious we can identify novel diseases fast enough (presumably in animal reservoirs) fast enough to be effective. There are too many unseen places on this planet, and pathogens evolve too quickly. Again, it only takes one.
What should be boosted and universalized is disease surveillance. The patchwork (nationally and internationally) systems for stitching together sample -> testing -> result communication could bear a lot of improvement.
The “most stringent border lockdowns” didn’t happen, at least not in a timely way. The WHO is one reason why - even at the end of January 2020 they recommended against countries taking measures like border closures. The US travel ban didn’t get implemented until February 2020, and it still had various exemptions and tens of thousands of travelers from Hubei continued to pour into the US. What really should have happened is that China should have voluntarily shut down all their international ports in mid-December 2019. Unfortunately even though China shut down some domestic flights in January 2020, they didn’t shut international flights until March 2020 (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...), following a call between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
A bit of restraint and some more thinking about this on your part would go a long way towards a more reasonable stance. But those that see the UN and the WHO as the root of all evil tend to do everything they can to avoid seeing reason, instead everything gets bent to the 'UN bad' talking point.
If you cancel, and there is no snow, you've caused economic damage, which has very real health consequences.
If you don't cancel, and there is heavy snow, you've caused physical damage, with very real health consequences.
Implementing full international pandemic prevention protocols in a timely manner was probably realistically impossible, given it's never been done in the 21st century.
But beyond that, it's questionable whether making the decision at the time, knowing what was known about SARS-CoV-2, was even a justifiable call. For the reasons you mentioned.
And not just because of the alarmist factor, but because of very real (and sometimes lethal) consequences of implementing them. And I don't think there was a case for preemptively being that aggressive, given MERS and SARS-CoV-1 were both regionally contained.
While I am OK with science being wrong and then corrected, WHO has eroded public trust in staying objective and seeking truth.
But it has nothing to do with COVID-19.
Virus provenance is important. It’s not a blame game. If it escapes from a lab they owe the world every piece of research they have on it but we’ll never get there if everyone says “hey hey let’s not play the blame game here”
Note that that doesn't rule out that it wasn't the case, but it is to the best of my knowledge not something that we have even a shred of direct evidence for.
This situation is, of course, a tragedy, but it is also what we have.
I'm sure plenty of authoritarian regimes would love to have information on all sorts of things that health agencies could be made to collect by treaty. How about just "travel?" Let's track the movement of every person from place to place. It's for the pandemic! It's definitely is not part of a surveillance apparatus meant to stifle dissent, not in the slightest.
You can't sacrifice the superior computational power of decentralized peoples acting in their best interest and substitute it with some truly wishful thinking that there will exist some superior knowledge that just needs centralized power in order to control a pandemic.
That said, I'm not stupid enough to think that's a good idea, and welcome any innovations in decentralized coordination.
Nations should handle their borders-- that's the point and root of a nation: to be born in a specifically territory.
> Nations should handle their borders-- that's the point and root of a nation: to be born in a specifically territory.
And obviously, there are giant classes of problems that cannot be addressed effectively (or at all) with that outlook.
For instance: a nation focused solely on its own territory will be unable to prevent a pandemic disease from affecting it if its neighbor manages to cover it up long enough for it spread across the boarder.
It's basically the externality problem from economics.
Again: nations should handle their borders.
That means a strong border policy focused on border defense from illegal entry, and reduced, quarantined, and/or eliminated immigration in times of pandemic.
And I disagree with your assessment especially your assertion of "unable". Sure, Some nations will have more difficulty than others-- self-sustainability being the main determining factor in terms of quarantining trade & immigrants.
This idea of a country hiding the pandemic-- Yes, we've already see that with China. And, Trump was attacked for closing down the border, but of course was the rational decision.
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Also, you present a false dichotomy: That by strictly controlling borders is mutually exlusive regardign a nationn's submission to globalistic where we give power to agencies subject to the human condition of greed, power-&-financial-corruption, and criminal financial conspiracy (look at the International Olympic Committee and FIFA).
That said, I also hold the view that the United Nations and WHO should not be responsible for owning, claiming power/responsibility over, or enforcing anything upon or within my particular Nation (The United States).
--> My nation belongs to my Government, governed by my people. Not a non-transparent, subject-to-corruption international agency
> Again: nations should handle their borders.
> That means a strong border policy focused on border defense from illegal entry, and reduced, quarantined, and/or eliminated immigration in times of pandemic.
And again, that won't actually work during a pandemic. Are you going to strand your own citizens overseas at a drop of a hat? Diseases can travel in them just as well as in a foreigner. If your focus is exclusively on your own borders and territory, and you're not cooperating with other nations, your border agency is going to be flying blind in the early stages of a pandemic and will probably fail to keep the disease out.
Similarly, even if you do manage to control it internally, the kinds of barriers you'll need to maintain will have massive costs, that may actually be higher than participating in a global response to a global problem.
but it's a repetition of a False Dichotomy, as I already pointed out. You have anything original?
It doesn't mean my nation should stop protecting its borders.
If anything, it indicates my nation should put more resources into protecting our borders.
I fail to see the premise of your argument, other than "In pandemics, bad things happen".
As I said-- Restrict immigration & quarantine immigrants. Simple.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Isn’t this what happened with COVID-19 anyways in the present situation with globalism? There were scientists from WIV that were hospitalized in November. A lab leak still seems like the most likely origin theory. China didn’t tell the WHO until the end of December 2019, and it isn’t clear why - perhaps they didn’t want to cause panic, or maybe they wanted to be sure before taking big steps, or maybe they were secretly hoarding medical supplies, or maybe they did not want the rest of the world to continue pandemic-free and leave them behind economically. I cannot say which, but given the kind of things the CCP is willing to do (see Tibet, Hong Kong, Uyghurs, etc.) I wouldn’t put malicious strategy past them. But my point is, even with globalism, I am not sure we get the benefit of neighbors not covering things up - so we might as well try something else?