zlacker

>>lazycr+(OP)
The WHO is a useless organization. For political reasons, it will be necessary to engage, but hopefully US authorities will not treat it as an information source.

The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it.

But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examined yourself.

>>renewi+17
There is no winning with you... Of course it cannot be too powerful, because then nationalists would scream bloody murder and refuse to have anything to do with it.

The WHO is a forum to coordinate strategy and exchange information. Obviously, this requires a minimum of good faith, which seems to be difficult for some countries (yes, particularly dictatorships). But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.

So yes, China will lie, which will make life worse for epidemiologists and governments across the globe, but not as worse as it could be with China being entirely uncooperative.

It is not the world police, and it won’t come anywhere and do anything against the local government’s wishes. Otherwise the screams world be even louder, and justifiably so.

>>kergon+3d
I don't think anyone wants the WHO to be powerful. They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't. But that isn't the WHO's fault or anyone working there. It's a property of what the WHO is.

>>renewi+Md
> They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't

They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China.

If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.

>>kergon+hf
> They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies.

Their problem is not that their data is bad. Their problem is that they are acting like a political entity when they are supposed to be an impartial, data driven, scientific organization. For example, the WHO railed against common sense risk mitigation strategies such as travel restrictions (i.e. isolate China) early on with COVID when they were precisely what was needed to reduce risk. They did so for political or monetary reasons (closing borders harms economies). Xi latched on to this and used it as justification to keep borders open. Unsurprisingly, COVID subsequently spread rapidly between China and countries that had maintained open borders with China.

It is not the WHO's job to consider the economic ramifications of their policy suggestions: that is the job of politicians. It is their job to put forward suggestions for how to limit the spread of disease regardless of the impact to economies or governments.