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
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.
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?
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.
You’re 100% absolutely clueless about China, please go read about it, like actually read, lefty Facebook memes don’t count.
The Chinese government is for the people because it governs for the people, lifting them out of poverty, listening to their concerns and problems and solving them. It’s pretty obvious that you’ve spent absolutely no time at all speaking with people who are from China and have no curiosity whatsoever about the reality of living there. You saw the China bad memes on reddit and gobble it up like a gullible moron.
Obviously. I’m a communist. I don’t look at a country where the communist party has successfully pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty and improved life dramatically and think “disgusting shit hole” because the people are yellow and the New York Times told me they don’t have freedom of speech there. Take your western chauvinism and get fucked.
you sound a lot like a capitalist right now. because you're spouting all the standard defenses of capitalism. i do not wish to engage in this anymore. please don't reply.