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The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

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Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#71

Post by loceng »

jacquesm wrote: post #60
ei8htyfi5e wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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...

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#72

Post by jacquesm »

garmaine wrote: post #55
jimmydorry wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a whole, the world is better off with the FDA's and their equivalent per nation. They approve and oversee the distribution of health and food products and set out minimum guidelines that influence how said products are marketed, recalled or banned; which on balance is a positive for society in the absence of a better regulatory body. By definition, these groups are political though. Almost none of them conduct the…

Anyone who lived through the AIDS epidemic can tell you that having a regulatory body is not automatically better than none at all. FDA bureaucracy and inaction has killed more Americans than WW2. Dissolving the FDA, or at least the gatekeeping branches of it, is a third option that ought to be seriously considered.

> Dissolving the FDA, or at least the gatekeeping branches of it, is a third option that ought to be seriously considered.

Yes, so that the supplements industry can run amok on an unsuspecting public. No really, that's just what we need, especially now.

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#73

Post by dang_wumao »

jacquesm wrote: post #57
louloulou wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contr…

China blocked (incoming) international flights but allowed outgoing, while calling countries who blocked incoming flights from China racist.

Who's side is the WHO on?

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#74

Post by jacquesm »

loceng wrote: post #71
jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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,…

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.

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#75

Post by louloulou »

jacquesm wrote: post #57
louloulou wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contr…

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.

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#76

Post by throwawaysea »

jacquesm wrote: post #37

The comments here are roughly the opposite of what a responsible group of people should agree to. Yes, the WHO isn't perfect. They made a ton of mistakes, especially in the beginning when information was scarce and the demands for information far outstripped their ability to deliver. But focusing on the mistakes and trying to play politics with the sensitive situation that they were handed after the fact certainly is…

> 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.

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.

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#77

Post by dang_wumao »

throwawaysea wrote: post #76
jacquesm wrote: post #37

The comments here are roughly the opposite of what a responsible group of people should agree to. Yes, the WHO isn't perfect. They made a ton of mistakes, especially in the beginning when information was scarce and the demands for information far outstripped their ability to deliver. But focusing on the mistakes and trying to play politics with the sensitive situation that they were handed after the fact certainly is…

> 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. 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…

Lets not forget that after Taiwan warned the WHO. The WHO then lied about it and told us that China informed them, then revised their own timeline to state that they had to ask China first as China didn't approach them at all.

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#78

Post by jacquesm »

louloulou wrote: post #75
jacquesm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contr…

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.

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#79

Post by ethbr0 »

golemotron wrote: post #33
tcmart14 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this argument is still in bad faith. A co-worker last year was talking about how a mask mandate was the biggest violation of freedom ever in American history. So I kindly reminded my co-worker, internment camps for Japanese-americans were less of a violation? Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus during the civil war? Those are just two examples of many. These were all moves made by emergency powers that were.…

Emergency powers from the Patriot Act are still in effect. 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.

"The fact that humans are the only reservoir for smallpox infection and that carriers did not exist, played a significant role in the eradication of smallpox." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication

SARS-CoV-2 eradication is probably impossible.

Re: The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

#80

Post by tcmart14 »

golemotron wrote: post #33
tcmart14 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this argument is still in bad faith. A co-worker last year was talking about how a mask mandate was the biggest violation of freedom ever in American history. So I kindly reminded my co-worker, internment camps for Japanese-americans were less of a violation? Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus during the civil war? Those are just two examples of many. These were all moves made by emergency powers that were.…

Emergency powers from the Patriot Act are still in effect. 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.

I do think the patriot act is a good counter example. However I think this is probably because of the point you made in the second paragraph. "There is no defined end." This is true, with COVID and the patriot act. Unfortunately, I think a reason why is because if someone defines and end point, it comes and various things are repealed and something happens, it is a career ender. Taking the Patriot Act as an example because I think it is probably the most clear cut. If tomorrow a group of politicians ended the patriot act on the premise that, no planes have smashed into buildings because of terrorists in two decades, great. But a year later, a plane crashes into a skyscraper, where will society put them blame? Unfortunately, on those politicians more than likely. Not even just planes smashing into buildings, if suddenly a suicide bomber blows off in a town square, there will be lots of people up in arms about the Patriot act being ended. Which is unfortunate, but it creates a situation where I see no politician wants to put a stake in the ground of, "this is the goal." I think propaganda by political parties (both, not a single) is to thank for that largely.
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