What are you talking about?! Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO.
There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion as “officially correct science”, YouTube is seriously damaging humanity.
COVID-19 is a novel virus. All information is misinformation until it isn't. I could say that the reason that some people are asymptomatic is that the virus is lying dormant in them like herpes. Can anyone credibly refute that?
Logic would dictate that a novel virus -- novel in that we don't know everything about it -- is a threat to the survival of our species as a whole until disproven otherwise and that we should collectively do everything that we can to minimize its spread.
What I know to be true is that to curb the infection rate, we should stop spitting in each other's mouths. Yes, there is science at the base of that assertion, but mostly it's just common fucking sense.
If you can tell me how basic common sense is being subverted on a massive scale without the use of a platform of social manipulation, I'm willing to hear you out.
Why do you want to curb the infection rate? What’s the end goal?
I’m strongly on the Swedish/Trump side here. We know that the virus is practically harmless for youth and young adults. If immunity persists, we should let them get infected ASAP while protecting the old/vulnerable. If immunity fades, then waiting for the vaccine is pointless anyways. As a young person, I won’t be taking the vaccine anytime soon anyways, not because I have anything against vaccines, but because I have many doubts about barely tested drugs in general (I’ll take it after it’s been tested for a few years).
How do we know it's harmless for youth and young adults? You know what you've seen. Again, this is a novel virus. It's new. It could be setting up shop in your brain, heart, kidney, liver, semen -- wherever.
It could be invisibly weakening your lungs just enough that a flu can come through and kill you.
I would suggest a deep dive on mercury poisoning, radiation poisoning, lead poisoning, asbestos, and whatever other reminders you may find throughout history that assuming you know what nature is up to without the benefit of lengthy scientific review never turns out well for the cocksure.
Well we won’t know what it’s long term effects are for the next 70 years... hell we’re even now figuring out that Herpes virus might have something to do with dementia...
And say we get a vaccine next year. Don’t you worry that if we relax lockdowns, we’re just gonna trigger the next devastating virus?
Let’s face it, life is a risk, and we accept a certain amount of elevated risk in exchange for comfort/utility (e.g. unprotected sex, industry-produced food, driving). This virus seems in line (at least for young adults). So the only real risk here, is government repression.
I don't know about "practically harmless for youth and young adults" - but as they say, I believe in your right to express your opinion.
Seeing the downvotes, I suppose the majority here disagree with the statement. But at least the comment is still readable/visible. I think it's healthier for public discourse to have differing sides and points of view expressed, to argue in a good sense of the term, by logic and evidence, to hopefully arrive at some common understanding.
"Fact checking" and judgements of "misinformation" are necessary, I can see, but a question remains - who checks the fact-checkers, and judges the censors?
I don't trust Google to be a neutral party in such decisions - maybe in this particular case they're right, but we shouldn't depend on a for-profit corporation to be a trustworthy judge of anything in general.
Do they have the right to ban whatever they see unfit on their platforms? Yes, I think so.
Completely false. The WHO claimed there was no evidence of human to human transmission after doctors in Wuhan were already getting sick, failed to share warnings from Taiwanese researchers with the rest of the world, argued against travel restrictions from China and also claimed mask use wasn't helpful.
They did a horrible job that has cost many, many lives. I've been in Taiwan and was gritting my teeth while diffing what they were saying vs local reporting from December through March.
China and WHO confirmed human to human transmission on Jan 20, before any doctors died and before China closed Wuhan province. Anyone who says or implies otherwise are lying or misinformed.
Their actual message is exactly what you should want and expect from a science based organisation:
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳.
There is nothing false or misleading, and they updated the public as new information came to light.
I can't emphasis enough how correct this behaviour is for a scientific organisation.
And for the sceptics who will claim China was covering something up: why didn't they shut down Wuhan until 23 Jan?
The Taiwanese CDC shared evidence in December that strongly suggested human-to-human transmission[1]. The WHO chose not to share this communication and went further by publishing the above tweet which suggested the exact opposite.
Their co-lead on COVID-19 even went so far as to hang up on a journalist[2] who asked about Taiwan.
If this is your idea of "correct behaviour" for a scientific org, I cringe to imagine your vision of a poorly run one.
I'm not defending WHOs treatment of Taiwan. I think that incident was atrocious.
Your link says (about the Dec 31 email): "Public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease. However, because at the time there were as yet no cases of the disease in Taiwan, we could not state directly and conclusively that there had been human-to-human transmission."
That's no different to what China or the WHO were saying in this timeframe. The constant "no confirmed human transmission" were because everyone was watching for it.
Again, there is no evidence China hid anything here, and Taiwan doesn't say anything different.
I apologize if this is presumptuous of me, but I get the impression that you don't live here, haven't followed this topic in much detail and probably haven't read anything at all in local media from that time frame.
Here's more background:
Dr. Li Wenliang's email warning colleagues about the outbreak was sent on December 30th. Multiple Taiwanese doctors were working in Wuhan at that time. Taiwan's very early and very small outbreak was from people evacuated from Wuhan. The CDC warnings weren't about what was seen in the Covid positive evacuees in Taiwan. The warnings were based on direct experience in Wuhan and they did suggest human-to-human transmission.
There was no hard proof, but there was a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Yes, it's possible Taiwan's CDC was overly suspicious due to memories of how SARS was covered up in 2003. However, given the way epidemics spread, the wiser course is to take circumstantial evidence of transmission very seriously.
There was no hard proof, but there was a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Yes, it's possible Taiwan's CDC was overly suspicious due to memories of how SARS was covered up in 2003. However, given the way epidemics spread, the wiser course is to take circumstantial evidence of transmission very seriously.
I agree with this entirely. But I don't think there is any evidence that the WHO - or China - thought otherwise.
I'd note that the WHO bulletins from both Jan 5[1] and Jan 12[2] mentioned "Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported." (Jan 12, Jan 5 was similar).
Now this turned out to be wrong, but that doesn't indicate a cover-up. As your link from Taiwan said, no one definitively knew.
I'm very aware of the messages (not emails) shared by the doctor. I know he was forced to retract them by the regional government, and later exonerated by the central government. I think the dates here are important - as you mentioned it was Dec 30 he sent them, and by Jan 20 the central government had taken over. I do think the Wuhan regional government did try to minimise news of the outbreak, and I think criticism of that is fair - but needs to be tempered by acknowledgement that the central government acted relatively quickly and didn't try to hide things.
I think it's likely that external pressure from Taiwan, Japan, Korea and elsewhere made it clear to the central government that they needed to intervene.
I hope we can agree to argue about spilled milk doesn't help anyone. Especially when this spilled milk is used now to basically discredit very relevant organizations in the midst of a pandemic. But maybe you can share some recent fuck ups from the side of the WHO, real fuck ups and not opinions that changed over time as they learned more and more about COVID-19.
Refusing to deal with Taiwan's CDC in a reasonable manner is a massive and continuing fuck up.
The WHO is a politically captured organization lead by a man who covered up three separate cholera outbreaks in his own country. I have little respect for or interest in them.
No January 2019. As a reply to the WHO revising their opinion on human-to-human transmission commment above. I read the situation reports a lot as well, I guess I'll start doing so again.
Regarding the GP, attacking the WHO for changing their minds regarding human to human transmission as he found a statement dating before the one you shared. Doing that would also allow you to attack the WHO for not talking about COVID-19 before it struck, same logic and just as wrong.
No, they also protested banning of flights (e.g. when Trump banned flights from China and later from the EU), praised China on their pandemic response, ... most recently, they only came out against lockdowns just now, even though others (e.g. Trump, Sweden, ...) were promoting this policy for months already.
China, more local authorities, screwed up the early days. Then they got this thing nder control quite fast, with harsh measures.
It is still not possible to tell whther the Swedish way was the bast way or not. Lockdowns worked in the early days, the goal was to avoid overloading hospitals. Stuff like SARS and MERS didn't spread by planes to a large extent, did they? So not banning them kind of made sense, until people learned more and their opinion changed.
Lockdowns helped halt the spread when the virus wasn't already everywehere, at least much better then they would now where the virus has spread across the globe, more or less.
And just yesterday, Germany and France reinstituted lockdowns. Things change, and I'd rather listen to people who change their minds with changed facts instead of broken clocks that a right twice per day.
There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion as “officially correct science”, YouTube is seriously damaging humanity.