161–170 of 664 posts
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The difference is there is no opposition to question the official stance. So I’d say it’s naive to imply the same holds true everywhere. Even Russia and Turkey have vocal dissidents.
Last time I checked Turkey is still democracy. A better example would be Egypt or KSA or UAE.
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I don't think anyone wants the WHO to be powerful . They want the WHO to be honest . And they aren't. But that isn't the WHO's fault or anyone working there. It's a property of what the WHO is.
> They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China. If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.
Government is just people trying to do triage, discern signal from noise, coordination, move the ball forward... with a bunch of other people.
People expect too much. It's amazing anything works at all. We should all marvel at the progress we've somehow achieved thus far.
While striving too do better, of course.
First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…
Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species. FAR FAR FAR more plausible.
A random virus, no. This one, we do.
We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to be a better virus than either parent.
This virus looks like a combination of apparently unrelated viruses. See https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy... for confirmation. That happens to be something that can happen either naturally or artificially.
Where conspiracy theorists get going is that a few years ago there were papers from the lab near Wuhan suggesting that a combination much like COVID-19's actual combination should be particularly effective in humans. So this looks like an extension of a known line of research from a lab involved in military work. Combine that with the local coverup and you can see how people go down the rabbit hole.
Forgive my ignorance but even if it was lab created, so what? I don’t really understand why it matters or not. Didn’t the entire world basically have a nearly 3 month heads up on this either way?
If it was leaked in oct that’s far earlier then it making it out into general knowledge in Ja. But granted that doesn’t mean the world would have acted, still took most of it till like March to do anything about it lol
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> They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China. If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.
If they are "working with what they have", then they should not speak from a position of authority. Authority is derived from something being something that everyone has . In the past, achieving that goal practically guaranteed authenticity to within a comfortable enough quanta for everyone to work with. With more advanced remote sensing equipment, the decreased cost to publish, reach one can attain for relatively li…
So, perhaps there is a valid reason for China to refuse to give the raw data on early COVID-19 victims to the WHO, but I have to say, as a reader who's never been particularly impressed by the possibility of it being lab-created, I have to say this is not a good look for China.
>as a reader who's never been particularly impressed by the possibility of it being lab-created It need not be "lab-created". Most samples are taken from the wild, and then has its evolution stimulated for research.
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Mask early, serious lockdown as soon as it becomes serious, and don’t end lockdowns before numbers are way low. We masked late, put lockdowns in place late if at all, and ended them way too early, which means that some countries went through several ones. And we’re not through yet. That said, I don’t share the optimism of the parent poster. This would be a heavy burden in terms of freedom and human rights for a resul…
I remember that at the time when we were masking up in the Czech Republic (first half of march, maybe..?), WHO was actually talking a lot about the dangers of face masks when used too eagerly and improperly. Or at least that was what had gotten through our mainstream media.
WHO changed its position on masks as late as June 2020. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200608/who-changes-stance-...
The US government changed its stance by April: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/04/08/why...
In much of the world, people who wore masks were subject to ridicule, especially on social media because of the cynical public health messaging, which seemed to be about preserving stocks of masks for healthcare workers by telling the public that “masks don’t work” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...).
The New York Times op-ed above, and efforts from the Czech Republic made discussing public masking more acceptable in the US, and then the rest of the world.
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>> If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time. > Mask early Are we living in the same timeline? https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1243972193169616898 https://twitter.com/UNGeneva/status/1244661916535930886 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234871709091667969 htt…
Right, yes, that was early March. The guidelines evolved as more information became available and they released new advice in early April, which is far from ideal but better than a lot of governments reactions. Their official stance before that was rigorous test, isolate, and trace, which was not done seriously anywhere outside China.
I feel like the reporting from the WHO was deliberately sub-par for political reasons. For example the vacillating on masks - everyone knew that masks helped, but the WHO tried to be on the fence about it because some countries were experiencing shortages. Another example of the WHO playing politics was when they neglected to publish the advice not to trust folk remedies, since that would have gone against a Chinese government campaign to try softly promote TCM, perhaps as a form of psychological comfort to the hundreds of millions stuck in lockdown.
Living through corona has helped me to realize that successful public health policy isn't just about giving everyone the raw facts, it's also about managing people's morale and trying to influence their behavior through propaganda. I think the WHO tried to do this, but it wasn't universally successful.
First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…
Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species. FAR FAR FAR more plausible.
There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up ensued.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species. FAR FAR FAR more plausible.
Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. A random virus, no. This one, we do. We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to b…