The WHO chartered something called the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, and yesterday they released their second report. It's not too long, so I read the whole thing to judge for myself how bad the headlines are. Here's my summary of its contents:
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The whole world was totally unprepared
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Measurements like the Global Health Security Index turned out to be bullshit
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Social media has created an infodemic
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Inequalities everywhere have been exacerbated
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Poorer countries are unjustly being left without access to PPE and vaccines
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Precarious and informal workers in wealthy countries are suffering disproportionately
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"Public health containment measures should have been implemented immediately in any country with a likely case. They were not."
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Some countries (unnamed) sacrificed public health and lives to make the line go up
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Overall, the Asia-Pacific countries and the Africa CDC have been doing a decent job
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The global supply chain is weak
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The WHO should have used the term "pandemic" sooner than March
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The WHO is underfunded and forced to waste too much time fundraising
Also buried in the report is this single criticism of China:
Public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January.
Guess which parts the Western media chose to focus on?
CNN: China and WHO acted too slowly to contain Covid-19, says independent panel
The Week: Independent panel slams China and WHO over Covid-19 response
AP: China, WHO should have acted quicker to stop pandemic
Sydney Morning Herald: 'Signal was ignored': Independent inquiry criticises China and WHO over COVID
Seattle Times: Panel: China, WHO should have acted quicker to stop pandemic
Remember when the imperialist media was criticizing China for acting too aggressively and authoritarian with its lockdowns? Lmao
i mean, yeah, china fucked up. they could have handled it before it was a problem if they were less of a totalitarian propagandist hell.
but then some people decided to deliberately breed it, like a god damn puppy mill of plague. because some places just refuse to be outdone when it comes to being hell.
Idk it seems to me like they were expending tremendous amounts of effort on stopping the virus from pretty early on, before Italy started to get really bad anyhow, and that those efforts paid off and they essentially dealt with uncontrolled spread there. If there was an initial sluggishness due to them being lying chicom authoritarians as you suggest then it wasn't enough to hold them back when it came to what really mattered in terms of keeping your population safe from a plague.
as soon as they got past the initial "shut up stop making us look bad" they went at it like a real problem. people died, and initial whistleblowers were jailed/killed.
its not in the top ten worst responses, but it was a VERY bad start and you shouldn't fucking defend that. public health should take priority over reputation. always.
What whistleblowers were jailed or killed? Stop citing this "common knowledge" bullshit.
names were referenced elsewhere. stop defending a shithole that creates billionaires at the expense of the people.
China’s people are really happy with their government precisely because their economic growth hasn’t been “at the expense of the people”, the people have benefitted tremendously from the policies of their government.
k. americans five years ago were also mostly happy with their government. people are stupid and easily fooled by something as pervasive as a state. and you can't claim its 'not at the expense of the people' if there are billionaires. which there are.
First of all, no the fuck they weren’t lol, but I guess whatever the fuck you need to say to hold on to your “China bad” brain worms. I’m talking about things like a 10 year study showing 95% satisfaction with the government, show me anything remotely comparable for the US or other comparable capitalist state.
It’s not at the expense of the people because life has gotten better in leaps and bounds for the people specifically because of the same policies that produced billionaires, the existence of billionaires in and of itself being regrettable. Do you seriously think if given the choice of undoing all the reform and opening up policies which allowed China to build world class infrastructure for the people and eradicate extreme poverty they would jump at that opportunity because “hey at least there wouldn’t be any billionaires 😡”. This is just clueless.
explain to me how a government can both allow the existence of billionaires or spend that much on internal propaganda/silencing and claim to be "for the people". because I can't think of one good god damn reason. and neither can you without FAR more drugs than I'm on right now.
chinas progress mostly happened during or as the result of their old communist policies, from back when they weren't just a disgusting shit hole and maybe we could have hoped for them to be something. I don't know about you, but I think capitalism is bad, and that it doesn't liberate people. fuck you and your libertarian "markets will save us" bullshit.
I was ignoring online China discourse at the time because it was gross, so I might not have been paying close enough attention, who did they jail and kill for this coverup?
No one. She's probably thinking of Dr. Li.
i don't even remember. I mostly ignore states on the default assumption that they're all trash, and my brain does not have space for all the victims of state violence. one of the first doctors to speak out about it if I recall.
You're coming at this from somewhere else, an anarchist perspective which I respect is more coherent so I'll take your word for it (F to the doc) but let me just say where I'm coming from:
At my usual break table at work, we were talking about the pandemic a fair amount back then. I have a friend at this table, very good friend but not what you would typically consider 'intelligent', in fact, whatever the nicest word for the opposite is. And they would talk about the pandemic in China, with info from social media, and it was full of stuff like, they're executing people in the streets, they're covering it up, they're burning bodies, killing doctors, etc etc. And literally any followup would lead a similar place: "I don't know the name, or the name of the city, I don't know when it happened, but trust me bro, I saw it somewhere, don't remember where, but it was horrible". Sometimes they would show me videos, almost universally mislabeled ones, maliciously mislabeled ones. This was in March when surely the coverup must have stopped. So I try to filter through vague and scary claims, because (unlike you) the people telling my work buddy all these things online were not doing it out of some love of the truth, they were just using it as a excuse to be racist.
Someone else remembered the doctors name anyhow, gonna read into it
oh absolutely; no reason to trust bullshit capitalist sources, and there's a lot of propaganda. sorry, im just used to uncritical defenses of the PRC, which I don't consider even remotely okay post-deng (communist siege mentality isn't great, but after you drop the communism, it's just general capitalist imperialism with better sauce and a little less violence).
and of course they were fucking burning bodies! what the fuck else do you do when you have plague dead on that scale!?
I meant like piling them up and torching the pile rather than cremation.
whatever gets the job done, as far as neutralizing the biological threat.
also, how the fuck is that hiding literally anything; isn't cremation more discrete?
Yeah, I'm sure China could have done better---because there is always room for improvement and nobody is perfect---but their response has been lightyears ahead of the West's and so singling them out for criticism is ridiculous. Although I am curious what you think "totalitarianism" and propaganda had to do with it.
so to quote another reply to me:
some of whom were jailed for trying to blow the whistle any organization that does this should be named and shamed. fuck them.
and then go to the SECOND HALF of my comment.
You're probably referring to the Dr. Li saga. There was a lot of misinformation about that.
https://i.imgur.com/pcok0nE.jpg
Dr. Li Wenliang was an ophthalmologist working at a hospital in Wuhan that was seeing an influx of patients at the very start of the pandemic, before people knew it was a new disease. He didn't treat viral pneumonia because that wasn't his specialty, but he could tell that something was wrong. The hospital knew something was wrong too, so they contacted the WHO and sent viral samples out to laboratories for identification. He knew he was in the middle of something big. He texted a few of his friends from medical school that his hospital had treated seven patients with a SARS-like disease originating from the same seafood market in Wuhan. He also told them to keep it to themselves because he didn't want to start a panic.
The next day (2019-12-31) the laboratory results came back, and the Chinese government and the WHO made an announcement that the outbreak was a novel virus. But Dr. Li's friends had already spread the news around town, and police were already investigating the rumor. Three days after the discovery of the virus was announced, the local police in Wuhan contacted Dr. Li and charged him with creating a public disturbance. He was like "Are you stupid? The government just announced that the virus is real! How can I it be a crime if I told the truth?" And the police said "Look, buddy, I don't know about no science because I'm just a meathead cop. But I do know that it's not your job to make public health announcements like that, real or not." And the cop charged him with "making false comments on the internet", which carried a $75 fine. But they dropped the fine in exchange for him signing a letter saying "I pwomise not to do it ever again." And he posted a photo of it to the internet, saying "lol look at this dumb shit they made me sign just for saying something that turned out to be true" 🙄.
He was understandably pissed off. He went back to work at the hospital the next day. Three days, he was seeing an eye patient who had COVID but didn't know about it, and he was infected. At this point in time (2020-01-06) still no one had died from COVID. The first COVID death occurred on 2020-01-11. At about that time, Dr. Li started showing symptoms, and he died about a month later. Then two months after that, the Wuhan police issued a retraction and publicly apologized for charging Dr Li with a crime, and they said they punished the cop who charged him. That's it. That's the Great Chinese Corona Cover-Up. Every time you see an American politician talking about how China must be held accountable for covering up the virus, that's the substance they're referring to. People were saying all sorts of crazy shit like the Chinese government purposefully killed him with COVID, or disappeared him, etc.
Apparently China passed a new law to protect whistleblowers like him in the future, but as you can tell from the timeline of events, Dr. Li didn't slow down or speed up the response to the virus, and he wasn't blowing the whistle on any administrative wrongdoing. He was punished (wrongly) for making comments at a time when things were already unfolding quickly and transparently, and he was on the sidelines of the events.
Yes, I understood and agreed with the second half of your comment.
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Thank you.
also, wihle I recognize western media spouts bullshit propaganda about their capitalist cousins to the east, I don't trust literally any positive thing I hear about mainland china from this website, unless its about, like, culture (food/architecture/music/etc) or good hiking spots or something. there are a lot of people who are uncritically that, and it very much bothers me. its like some weird mirror of reddit, and its super annoying that I can't find good honest sources.
BUT on this, after a quick web search; there was at least one named journalist and at least one named doctor who were arrested for it. references to others, but I didn't see names. cut the shit. no government with billionaires is worth this kind of uncritical loyalty.
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that's the thing, there is no reliable information, but it's a state, and one with billionaires, so it's generally safe to assume the shittier thing is the truth.
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okay statist.
Far be it from me to question your quick web search skills, but what were the names?
I'm willing to criticize China, I just need more substance than "I read some article but I don't remember" before I do so.
dr li wenliang (arrested, not just fined, then died of it), along with multiple articles referencing as many as nine unnamed others, and zhang zhan for pointing out that they did that and taking video of the cover up in early stages before they properly locked down. which, to be fair, they DID eventually do.
but I'm quite done here. I don't have confidence you can engage in good faith on this subject, or any where your favorite oppressive capitalist shithole is involved, and if I wanted to deal with this shit I'd go to r/sino.
My entire comment above is about Dr. Li.
Never heard of Zhang Zhan before, I'll look into that.
Edit: Found this Guardian story on her, which sources Radio Free Asia.
yeah thats pretty close to what I spotted on a quick google; im just so burnt out on pro-chinese-government shit in leftist spaces.
also saw references to 7-9 'others' in multiple articles about liang. varying numbers isn't great, but there's not a lot of space to find truth between western propaganda and chinese secrecy.
couple articles I saw about liang referenced others who were arrested for the same thing, and he was arrested for it. plus it took a whistleblower before people got their shit together.
id be willing to believe the whistleblower bridged the gap between scared intimidated local officials trying to not be murdered for causing a problem and the national folks who realized "oh shit, this is a problem" and then they punished her because WTF else is one supposed to do to messengers when you've got a stratified power structure and illusion of a competent benevolent state to maintain?
your second half is very much open for interpretation, I have no idea what you mean by it.
For everyone else, i'll try to rephrase this into something more tame.
There's a hypothesis that at the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan, local officials&doctors downplayed covid (and fudged the numbers probably) to probably avoid a negative response and/or punishment from the central government.
What's the evidence for that hypothesis?
It's from US intel community, so not very reliable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/world/asia/china-coronavirus-beijing-trump.html
exactly that. yes. its fine though; they were swiftly outdone in their incompetence and simpering failure by SUPERIOR FIRST WORLD CAPITALIST FREE MARKET PARAGONS who needed to show them how that shit is done.