At the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were starting to get concerned about this strange new disease in China, the WHO announced there was "no evidence of human-to-human transmission" and no need to restrict international travel to Wuhan. In reality, there was nothing but evidence of human-to-human transmission and plenty of Chinese doctors knew this, but the WHO repeated the Chinese government's lies.
Instead of trying to contain the pandemic in it's earliest stages, the WHO told the world there was nothing to worry about. They screwed up about as bad as they possibly could, and helped enable the spread of a disease.
> when people were starting to get concerned about this strange new disease in China, the WHO announced there was "no evidence of human-to-human transmission"
That is an US conservative disinformation meme, this [0] was the actual WHO tweet;
"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."
That statement only refers to those particular preliminary investigations, yielding no clear evidence. It's very specific and scientific language, that many news pundits just chose to read and interpret in the most generalized way possible to get their sensationalist outrage headline of "WHO says there is no evidence for H2H!".
There is a similar disinformation meme out about the WHO and CDC allegedly saying "masks don't help and people shouldn't wear them!", when the actual WHO and CDC statements were about prioritizing masks, as in respirators, for health care workers at the front, instead of the general public buying up all the supplies of them in panic.
A bit part of that was very unclear messaging by a whole lot of authorities and governments, where to this day nobody makes much of a distinction between "mask", as in any kind of face covering, and "mask" as in actual medical respirator like a FFP2/N95.
I'm not a conservative, nor am I parroting some meme, so almost nothing you say applies to me. My comment is based off reading the travel advisory the WHO put out claiming "no significant human-to-human transmission, and no infections among health care workers".
"WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travellers"
The WHO put it's faith in the Chinese government, how did that work out? If China was open and honest, we could have started taking COVID-19 seriously a month earlier. Instead they tried to assure everyone it was nothing to worry about and the WHO went right along with it.
> Human to human spread was confirmed before any international case was found.
Technically true, but very misleading. It was discovered that it was already in Italy before China acknowledged human-to-human transmission.
Also, nothing in my first comment has anything to do with the US. I don't know why you keep shifting attention to the US, unless you think the US is responsible for the international spread?
So China is the bad guy when
the Italians had person to person spread in Italy and didn't even notice let alone let anybody know there was person to person spread.
There was literally nothing the US could've done that would've lead to Covid being comtrolled. Their efforts to stop it spreading there from China seem to have more or less worked, and were at least effective enough that they weren't the problem - the US had contact tracing that suggested it wasn't really spreading, and genetic testing also indicated this wasn't the source of the major US outbreaks. What turned this into a global pandemic was undetected, large-scale community spread in Europe, in places like Italy - all the subsequent major outbreaks seem to have come from there except maybe for South Korea's. Those coutries listened to the WHO and followed their advice.
This just got obscured because the American media is a bunch of partisan trash with unfortunate global influence that saw the pandemic as a good way to replace a leader they dislike. So everything got distorted and spun based on that angle, and it did immense damage to people's understanding of the pandemic. American potlics seems to have a bit of a main protagonist problem at the best of times too.
On a more serious note: "The WHO" is already a sign of a limited understanding of how this works. In as far as an organization of that name exists, it's a tiny bureaucracy tasked with coordinating other organizations to carry out tasks set by the other thing called "WHO", which is just the label for a group of delegates from those national organizations.
The WHO does not have any institutional power of itself. It does not have any interests or credibility that is distinct from the interests and credibility of "getting the world's national health agencies" in a room.
