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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

#111

Post by ethbr0 »

golemotron wrote: post #107
ethbr0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yup. And that's why I would not want to see a treaty. Better to have nations acting independently of each other at the policy level, learning from each other's experiences. It's like a market where nations can explore different tradeoffs in how they declare an end or live with it.

What if my tradeoff is "I will partially vaccinate everyone in my country and not perform any surveillance, tracking, or sequencing and stockpile any critical PPE and prohibit export of vaccines"?

Absurd example, but that seems pretty harmful to every country with transportation links to me.

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

#112

Post by jacquesm »

toolz wrote: post #109
garmaine wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How am I arguing in bad faith? I’m deeply familiar with the actions of the FDA during the AIDS crisis, having studied it in college, read books, watched documentaries, etc. But I can’t convey that info through a HN comment, so I sought out an internet article which I first skimmed to make sure it got the facts straight before linking to. Did I violate some convention of discourse on HN in doing so?

You're not arguing in bad faith. You're being gaslit by someone who has already devolved to name calling in this thread.

Cherry picking cases to prove that an entire institution should somehow be disbanded in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary is arguing in bad faith. That you disagree because you and the other commenter here agree on the basic premise that you both believe FDA is bad and should be disbanded doesn't change that.

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

#113

Post by disambiguation »

nscalf wrote: post #12

An honest question, how do you feel about the WHO? I personally have severe distrust in them, at least the leadership. They have show they are heavily influenced by China, and that should be enough to remove them. They really botched early covid.

i can't answer it because it made me ask more questions:

- 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.

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

#114

Post by marchingtomars »

tablespoon wrote: post #59
marchingtomars wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--> 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 I disagree with your assessment especially your assertion of "unable". Sure, Some nat…

>>> Stop with the globalism > 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.…

It's a nice Hypothetical of a relatively tiny quantity of Edge Cases,

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.

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

#115

Post by golemotron »

ethbr0 wrote: post #111
golemotron wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And that's why I would not want to see a treaty. Better to have nations acting independently of each other at the policy level, learning from each other's experiences. It's like a market where nations can explore different tradeoffs in how they declare an end or live with it.

What if my tradeoff is "I will partially vaccinate everyone in my country and not perform any surveillance, tracking, or sequencing and stockpile any critical PPE and prohibit export of vaccines"? Absurd example, but that seems pretty harmful to every country with transportation links to me.

There's the concept of a border. They have liabilities but they have benefits too. We are too used to thinking of them as completely bad.

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

#116

Post by dang »

marchingtomars wrote: post #114
tablespoon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Stop with the globalism > 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.…

It's a nice Hypothetical of a relatively tiny quantity of Edge Cases, 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…

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. We do that regardless of the ideology the account is battling for, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#117

Post by dang »

coolso wrote: post #3

The WHO dragged their feet for weeks, even months, all so they could help the CCP not look as culpable as they are in all of this. They took China of all countries at their word - that or they knew they were lying and ran cover for them in the name of not offending certain groups of people - and as a result the world paid a greater price faster than it would've otherwise. Now we find out that the WHO skipped "Xi" in…

Could you please stop posting flamewar comments and ideological battle comments to HN? We ban accounts that keep doing that (because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for), and you've unfortunately been doing a ton of it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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

#118

Post by ed25519FUUU »

jacquesm wrote: post #89
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m very much concerned with our government funding gof research in a foreign and adversarial weapons laboratory. Stopping that research would be a very important lesson to learn in this pandemic because it might actually be able to stop the next covid 19.

Yes, stopping such research is important. But it has nothing to do with COVID-19.

Am I to believe that China was working on weaponizing a virus without also concurrently researching a cure/vaccine?

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”

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

#119

Post by prohobo »

disambiguation wrote: post #113
nscalf wrote: post #12

An honest question, how do you feel about the WHO? I personally have severe distrust in them, at least the leadership. They have show they are heavily influenced by China, and that should be enough to remove them. They really botched early covid.

i can't answer it because it made me ask more questions: - 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 worl…

I can at least provide theoretical clarity on "what happens if you don't comply" for less powerful nations: The WHO has been working with the IMF throughout the pandemic, distributing loans to countries that follow the WHO's Covid policies. So, any nation state in economic trouble must implement the policies to receive loans/funding.

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...

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

#120

Post by prohobo »

toolz wrote: post #29
wesleywt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A terrible take. We are fully connected to a point that national borders mean practically nothing. Only a coordinated response and open sharing of information can stop a disaster.

Centralization is a surefire way to fail at pandemic response. You will necessarily be pressuring the wrong intervention measures on people who don't want them when they could stand to intervene in a better way for their own region and serve as a datapoint for the rest of the world to learn from. You can't sacrifice the superior computational power of decentralized peoples acting in their best interest and substitute…

I think centralization could work quite well, it just hasn't in practice. When thinking of benevolent dictators, there's obviously some advantage there compared to uncoordinated decentralization.

That said, I'm not stupid enough to think that's a good idea, and welcome any innovations in decentralized coordination.

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