Hacker News Reader

I’m sorry, but I think we’re on different planets here.

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.

> I work and live in DC and that’s a forgone conclusion here.

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.

They present more credibility than you have so far here anyway (assuming it's not made up), so so far what they present is weighted heavier.

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...

I'm not sure who the 'they' are that you reference to, but China gave the WHO information, which the WHO passed on, exactly as they are charged to do.

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.

On Feb. 4, 2020, after a private meeting with Xi, Tedros formally announced to the WHO Executive Board that there was no need to “interfere with international travel and trade” and restricting Chinese flights was “counter-productive” to fighting the global spread of the virus.

That's a far cry from claiming that China controls the WHO.

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.

We still don't have the whole picture precisely because the CCP have covered-up and blocked any real investigation into the origins at every step.

There is nothing that will every satisfy the people that push the 'it was a lab leak' angle that it wasn't just like there is nothing that will ever convince people that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job that it wasn't or that pedophile democrats are running the world.

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.

This interview was pretty awkward for the WHO:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

Agreed, the WHO has to walk a fine line between trying to further its mission and not raising the stakes politically. I'm sure that each and every one of the members of the various committees has their own views on this but at the end of the day what matters is whether or not they can perform their mission. You see the same with sports, where the athletes may or may not care about the political situation they are in at all, but their participation, protest or lack thereof will be taken as a sign by all of those involved.

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.

China called it the Wuhan Virus. When the world called it the Wuhan Virus. State run media and the CCP called it racist. Then the WHO bent over and changed it. When the “India variant” happened, the WHO didn’t batter an eyelid.

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.

The reason the WHO changed it is because they did not want to have the politics of directly connecting the virus to China become a hindrance in their work. See also: "The Spanish Flu", the "Mexican Swine Flu" and others, associating a virus outbreak in name with a particular country allows for politicization which in turn can hinder doing something about it.

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.

> not calling a pandemic early enough and not being far more pro-active in calling for governments to curb the spread

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.

> They spent more time pandering to the CCP than being a /World Health Organization/.

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.