“The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease swept across the globe not because of the WHO’s errors but because of a “very fragmented, chaotic, state-centric response,” according to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
And now, with over 2 million reported cases and 125,000 deaths worldwide, countries “failing in their response have decided WHO is the culprit,” says Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.”
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“Most experts agree there are some legitimate criticisms of how the agency has handled the Covid-19 global health crisis, particularly in how it responded to China’s initial delays and suppression of key information. Other critiques, they say, are less founded.”
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“On January 22, just three weeks after first being notified of the virus’s existence, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus convened an emergency meeting to determine if the outbreak qualified as a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), the agency’s term for an “extraordinary event” that requires a coordinated international response — like SARS, H1N1, and Ebola outbreaks in 2014 and 2019. The experts couldn’t agree and decided to meet again. After the director-general traveled to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on January 29, a PHEIC was declared on January 30.
This declaration activated WHO measures to “address travel, trade, quarantine, screening, treatment” as well as national measures in countries that have tied their pandemic response plans to WHO declarations. “I called for WHO to do it a little earlier,” says Gostin, “but it had no impact on the epidemic.” Jha agrees. “I think they could have called it when they initially met, but it wouldn’t have made a big difference,” he says.”
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“all the experts Vox interviewed agreed that the US government’s lack of preparation for Covid-19 was not a result of WHO delays.”
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“ABC News reports US intelligence agencies warned the White House and the Pentagon of the disease as early as November. In January, trade adviser Peter Navarro warned the White House that the novel coronavirus could kill half a million Americans. In February, the US lost valuable weeks failing to develop effective testing. As late as February 27, Trump told a press briefing the virus would “disappear.” The next day, the first American died of Covid-19.
“WHO is not responsible for America not heeding the warnings of its own scientists and security apparatus — for two months,” says Jha. “That’s laughable.””
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“WHO has offered little criticism of governments’ responses.”
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“More than 430,000 people traveled from China to over 17 American cities after the virus was discovered but before the ban; another 40,000 people arrived to the US from China after the ban went into place.”
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“Although the WHO has not publicly criticized the American travel ban, it doesn’t recommend travel or trade restrictions during disease outbreaks, both because they often don’t work and because they can make disease response more difficult. Kamradt-Scott recalls firsthand his difficulty in trying to get from Australia to West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, when all but two commercial airlines had stopped flying there. “It’s not simply that it causes economic damage, but that it impedes responses,” he says. ”
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“Kamradt-Scott, however, is on the fence. He has just completed a literature review, looking at travel and trade restrictions, and his view is that travel bans “may have helped delay the arrival of the virus.” He predicts that eventually Covid-19 research will cause the WHO to revisit some of its guidelines. “It’s rather fraught. It does create economic problems, but if it can help countries by giving them time to prepare, perhaps it can be justified on that ground.”
But, he adds, “Trump implemented travel restrictions but then did nothing to prepare the country, so again, that really comes back to his administration.””
“One thing that happened is that after the 2009 H1N1 pandemic there were a lot of masks distributed to states and localities and they simply weren’t replenished. Then there was a plan to purchase thousands more ventilators. A contract was signed with a small medical equipment company in Southern California. That company was then bought by a different medical equipment company, and in the end the contract wasn’t fulfilled. The new ventilators never came in.
So there are these matters of prioritization and inattention that can affect whether in fact we have the supplies that have been recommended in the stockpile.”
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“There’s a key period that a lot of people are now focusing on, which is late January to mid-February. This is a point at which we were already aware of what had happened in China, and the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a “global health emergency of international concern.”
That was really the time to consider whether we had the supplies we needed of these essential items and to figure out whether the stockpile needed to be replenished rapidly and do whatever it took to make sufficient supplies available — whether that meant purchasing supplies from other sources or even using the DPA to force manufacturers to shift to production of ventilators, for example.
So even if it had not been replenished prior to this administration, there was a chance to do a better job at the outset.”
“Social distancing absolutely does work to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In the states that started social distancing the earliest, including Seattle and San Francisco, the growth of new cases has slowed noticeably. In places that implemented them a little later, like New York, the growth of new cases began to slow later.
Testing is still limited and the criteria for testing varies in different places, making direct comparisons difficult, but there are enough cities seeing improvement that a real trend can be observed.”
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“It’s a vexing situation. The US has succeeded at its first task of slowing the wildfire spread of the virus through our communities, but it may have achieved only a standstill, not a victory. And as pressure grows to open more businesses and get the country back to work, there is still limited (and not encouraging) data about what will be needed to keep the virus from roaring back. Even worse, if the data suggests that the country actually needs more stringent restrictions than the current ones, it’s hard to imagine who’d muster the political will to implement them.”
“In 1985, during the AIDS epidemic, the FDA placed a lifetime blood donation ban on all men who have ever had sex with men.
The policy was created to prevent blood banks from collecting blood that contains HIV. Since the AIDS crisis though, the US has instituted extensive procedures to test blood donations for infectious diseases, including HIV, to minimize this risk. It’s true that gay and bisexual men account for a large proportion of new HIV infections each year. It’s also true that tests to screen blood aren’t perfect. The risk of contracting HIV from a blood transfusion isn’t zero. But it is currently around 1 in 1.5 million.
The problem is that being gay isn’t the real risk factor here. Why should a monogamous gay man who has sex only with his husband be barred from donating blood when a heterosexual man who had condomless sex with 100 female partners in the past three months can? The latter is at dramatically greater risk of HIV infection.”
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“Earlier this month, the FDA shortened the ban to three months of abstinence from sex with other men, due in large part to the drastic drop in blood donations since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.”
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” The new FDA guidance is a good but insufficient step forward. It’s still going to leave out the vast majority of men who have sex with men. And it still promotes the internalized homophobia many gay men experience from growing up in a homophobic society: You can only be good and pure if you don’t have gay sex. This is psychologically damaging, unscientific, and wrong.
The rules need to change and be based on scientific behavioral risk factors. “Instead of a blanket ban on recent sex between men, we need to explore an approach that asks all donors about their recent behaviors, including condom use, number of partners, and use of preexposure prophylaxis, which we know is highly effective in preventing HIV,” explains Dr. Julia Marcus, an assistant professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she studies the epidemiology of HIV. Such risk-based screening systems have been successfully implemented in Spain, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa.”
““When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said at one point. “And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.”
Trump’s claim is false — governors have broad authority to close schools and businesses in their states.”
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“The irony is that while Trump claims to have dictatorial power, state governors keep calling on him to do more to provide them with the medical supplies they need to make sure each Covid patient can receive adequate medical care. Characteristically, Trump on Monday lied about this state of affairs by claiming “nobody is asking for ventilators.” (Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan — chair of the National Governors Association — said on Sunday’s installment of This Week that “to say that everybody is completely happy and we have everything we need is not quite accurate.”)”
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“conveying truthful information is not the point of these briefings. Instead, Trump’s objective is to reframe problems as the result of unfair media coverage and feed red meat to his base by sparring with reporters. On Monday, Trump attacked two female reporters — Paula Reid of CBS and Kaitlan Collins of CNN — when they dared to ask him questions about the government’s slow coronavirus response and his dictatorial statements, respectively.
“You are so disgraceful,” Trump admonished Reid at one point. “You know you’re a fake.””
“A campaign-style video President Donald Trump is promoting in an attempt to rewrite the history of his coronavirus response accidentally reveals the truth — that he didn’t really do much during a crucial period in February and early March when the virus was spreading undetected in America, besides downplaying the threat.
The video, which premiered during Monday’s unhinged White House coronavirus task force briefing and was then posted to Trump’s Twitter account, features a timeline of what the video refers to as the president’s “DECISIVE ACTION” during that period. But the list of Trump’s anti-coronavirus actions is far shorter than it might appear as it ticks by your screen.
For one thing, Trump had little to do with a number of the “actions” highlighted in the timeline. For another, the video includes a number of developments that are really nothing to brag about, such as the first US case being reported on January 20 and the CDC testing debacle that put the US behind the curve compared to other countries that have more successfully handled the coronavirus. And it skips right from early February to March, thereby revealing Trump didn’t do much during a period in which proactive measures could’ve been taken, saving lives”
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“instead of being focused on the coronavirus during that India trip, upon his February 26 return, Trump reportedly chastised a number of government officials over the CDC’s February 25 warning that the virus might cause “severe” disruption to American life — not because he thought the analysis was inaccurate, but because it hurt the stock market.”
“Protecting these workers is also a larger safety issue. In previous epidemics, unprotected support staff have emerged as hidden “super-spreaders” as they traverse hospital floors serving lunch, cleaning linens, or taking X-rays. During the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-’15, for example, support staff were up to 32 times more likely to become infected than the general population, according to the World Health Organization — and 48 percent more likely to become infected than doctors. And without these workers, the hospital’s delicate ecosystem would collapse.”
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