Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

> Out of curiosity, did they actually call it the "Wuhan virus" in the warnings you are referencing?

The warnings were definitely addressed to travelers from Wuhan, and mentioned a virus or pneumonia, I don't think they called it the "Wuhan virus" however.

Look, I think responding to a lot of these reports will make me seem like a China apologist, and to the extent that I think that China's early failures were less the cause of the outbreak in the US than the US' failure to react quickly once information was public, I guess I am. That said, of course all of this is in the context of China being a repressive, authoritarian state, which is obviously bad.

We know that there was a period of 5 days where Chinese leaders knew (or should have known) that the virus was airborne yet did not release this information publicly. I am not claiming they were fully transparent, it's clear that they weren't. But this was a delay on the order of days, it took weeks-month for the United States to mount anything that looked even remotely like a real policy response after they learned it was airborne. I do not think that those 5 days would have made a substantive difference to US policy.

Now onto your points:

1. Your wikipedia article about Covid-19 misinformation hits on the point about the 5 day delay, absolutely. Many of the other misinformation efforts cited are by individual politicians or smaller government apparatus, not necessarily the central government's stance. You can see similar misinformation promulgated in the United States among top politicians. I certainly buy, as per the wiki page, that somewhere like the 'Economic and Commercial Office of the Chinese Embassy in Kazakhstan' tweeted out misinformation about coronavirus, I am somewhat more skeptical that that had a serious impact on the coronavirus response.

2. Zhang Zhan arrived in Wuhan in February and was highly critical of lockdowns. While reprehensible, I do not think her arrest had a serious impact on people being aware of the reality of the virus, which was already public knowledge by then. Much more impactful in my view was the early suppression of reports from doctors in December conducted by the local (not central) government. So early in the pandemic, this could have had a size-able impact.

Governments like to save face. In Florida, state authorities fired and then arrested someone for revealing that true death counts were higher than reported.

3. I had not heard of this report. I've tried to do a bit more research on these claims, but haven't really been able to find much. I think it is important to note that, at the time, we were in the midst of a trade war with China, so there was a general decline in exports. I would like to hear more about this though.

> Is it possible that China was trying to walk a fine line by being transparent in those settings where it would be futile to lie, while acting differently in other settings to serve their own interests as much as possible?

Definitely, at least to some extent. If they were exclusively serving their interests, they probably didn't need to notify the WHO when they did and they probably could have suppressed a little longer, but it's clear they were manipulating the informational landscape for their own benefit. Really, my only claim is that the root of the pandemic in most of the West falls more on failure in Western nations to respond forcefully and less in the 5 day delay between knowledge of spread and disclosure.

No need to argue about that. Readers can just follow the thread to decide for themselves.

Anyhow, have a good day!

Agreed, they do risk accusations about bias then too though.

> The slavish subservience to authority and desperate clamor to lick boot sickens me.

Have you considered that the "desperate clamor" might just be a clamor to do the best thing ? And just how would we do that?

Your entire attitude seems to be predicated on the idea that nobody actually knows anything, there's no point listening to "experts" (even putting the quotes around the word is intended to be dismissive), and there's no way to spend time learning more about something.

I thoroughly reject that POV.

Look, you've provided a great list of terrible things that the US (and other) governments have done (though it's necessarily incomplete and mostly rather recent). But in the context of your point, so what?

What about the experts that know how to build bridges properly? What about the governmental policies that actually result in positive changes? What about the doctors, engineers, designers, architects, farmers who actually do have a better understanding of their fields than an average person?

I don't disagree with you about the lamentable actions of our government and the processes/structures that allow them to happen. But I reject the implication that this requires me to just be infinitely cynical about everything.

I would be suspicious of any claims that we should believe any particular individual about anything. Tearing down a particular individual for their mistakes (rightly or wrongly) is essentially a strawman.

I don't hear or read people saying "we should follow what Dr. Fauci says". I hear and read saying "we should follow the science", and that necessarily means (for a novel disease, whether that's HIV or COVID-19) entering into a process in which things are not certain, opinions differ, new information emerges. "The science" isn't a single, fixed answer for any situation, and even less so for a novel disease. Pretending that "the science" can essentially be identified with a single person is tremendously foolish, both for those who want to believe that person and those who want to tear them down.