It's only "better than nothing at all" if you assume that any action it could take is better than doing nothing. That doesn't seem to have been true recently to me. Was https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19 better than nothing?

WHO advised the world to perform as many tests as possible. And that was an excellent advice, only it was ignored and not taken seriously. That's an example where the WHO is not the problem but its enforcement capability (just the same problem with UN decisions on war zones, which can never be enforced).

To solve that, a reform is needed. But absolutely not by cutting its funds, which is silly.

Thanks, I hadn't known about that. It looks like this advice about tests was given on March 16? My city had already shut down by then due to outbreak.

Yes, unfortunately, as all UN parts, the WHO is a consensus organ, at the barycenter of individual countries' participating scientists... meanwhile, in countries or cities better connected with their experts, or just with better experts, the reaction is better and faster.

The exact quote was: "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test."

This doesn't sound like a good advice. It's not actionable. We don't have enough capacity to test more. If we could test a billion people tomorrow, we would already do it.

My fav useless tweet from WHO is "there's no evidence human human transmission". I mean, if you don't know for sure, then let's not announce it.

I don't think it was ignored, it just wasn't possible in most places.

As far as I know, most countries are ramping their testing facilities as fast as possible, some are just more effective or had a head start.

'As many tests as possible' is useless advice. Imagine if GDPR said companies should make data as secure as possible or NHTSA said make cars as safe as possible.

No it's a good advice. Because then that would have raised soon an acute awareness about asymptomatic bearers (e.g. through testing a representative sample of the general population), and thus awareness of the necessity of early lockdown.

Also, being able to test anybody who asks it would have dismissed arbitrary criteria that are pushed by governments around the world to minimize the illness. For example in the country where I am, it was until recently difficult to get tested unlike there was an established contact with a tested positive person.

I agree tests are useful, however the advice was not specific enough. The WHO should have specified how many tests are needed for various outcomes, offered early modeling, and facilitated information exchange to improve those models. Instead they simply played politics and offered very generalized and non-specific advice which overwhelmingly downplayed the risk.

Maybe a country has 1000 tests on hand, they test that first 1k people and can say they followed the WHO's advice. That's all that was possible given their immediate stock.

> Was https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19 better than nothing?

You do realize you linked to a January 14th tweet by the WHO stating:

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.

What exactly did they do?

>What exactly did they do?

I think that was the point. They didn't do anything of real substance, so was it better than doing nothing?

To me, it appears equivalent to doing nothing, and that's not better than doing nothing...

So their wrongdoing was to tweet their current status?

Yes easily misinterpreted short-phrased tweets are bad. Thanks to US president, we learned that.

I don't think they did anything necessarily wrong with that tweet. Just that it wasn't substantial.

It was leading people to think that human transmission was unlikely.

The equivalent yet still factually correct statement is "covid maybe transmits between humans". When you add uncertainty to a statement, it becomes factually correct.

In this case, doing nothing would have been better.

But does it justify to cut their funds?

They published a status of non-knowledge, easily misinterpreted. And sometimes later they published more alarmist statuses. It is quite normal to be wrong sometimes, even in science-related establishments.

Well if you want my opinion, I don't think they're particularly at fault for others inability to interpret what they meant by that tweet. I find that tweet to be pretty clear, but also nothing noteworthy. Don't see how we're better off than had they simply not tweeted it. Again, I don't think we're necessarily worse off, just not better off.

I was just responding to the comment above mine, which asked "what did they do", and tried to show that was probably the point the poster above that was making.

As to the main topic? I mostly think this is just more petty distraction, deflection, and pointing fingers. But, I do think it's worth considering what the WHO's purpose is and whether or not it's serving that purpose sufficiently. As to how I feel about cutting funds, I'm not sure yet...

In this case, the situation is that they communicate a lot and most of their communications are frankly beneficial to the world. Some of their publications are not, as we saw here. Considering the whole, it is better than nothing.

> Trump and his supporters have focused on a 14 January WHO tweet reporting the findings of preliminary Chinese studies suggesting “no clear evidence” of human-to-human transmission.

> While the WHO was obliged to report on the latest findings of a member state at the source of the outbreak, its officials told their counterparts in technical briefings on 10 and 11 January, and briefed the press on 14 January, that human-to-human transmission was still a strong possibility given the experience of past coronavirus epidemics and urged suitable precautions.

> [Gavin Yamey, the director of Duke University’s center for policy impact in global health] said it was ridiculous to point to a single tweet early in the pandemic as the fixed position of the WHO. “The whole point of science is that we have initial hypotheses and initial ideas, and we update those ideas as more and more data emerges,” he said.

(From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/trump-turns-...)

If orgs/people are punishable due to single tweets, how do you rate Trump's performance? He has several tweets that contributed to 25K deaths..

> He has several tweets that contributed to 25K deaths..

Cut his funding!

> Was https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19 better than nothing?

It was certainly better than Trump calling the disease a hoax concocted by the his political opponents including the media, so whatever problems WHO may have on COVID-19 response, Donald Trump is in no position to criticize.

Most commenters' opinions are based on deformations of what WHO really said. US media seem to negatively interpret the indeciseness of WHO, even if all individual countries' health organizations hardly knew better: at the beginning, very few was known about the virus (partly because China did not share everything they new on it, but that was still not revealed).

An example, WHO really said:

"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission"

which is realistic and prudent. But in this thread an in every other place on internet, it is interpreted by US people as:

"there is no human-to-human transmission"

which is downright crazy.

Also, I see a lot of mixing with Taiwan issues, even though the particular data about the pandemics in this country (and yes I am in favor of Taiwan independence, but that does not matter, and that's my point) did not change at all the scientific and public health conclusions and advises to be taken. In other words, to do their public health job, the WHO had absolutely no need to quote Taiwan in particular. Of course they also considered not angering China and so refrained to speak of Taiwan because of that too, but it would be the same for any of the UNO Security Council countries' delicate issues, including US.

If WHO was to be rebuilt upon better bases, everybody would benefit from it. But cutting its funds?? It's stupid.

PS: another point, UNO scientific organs really are just the sum of their individual countries' parts. It should not, it should be larger and better than its parts, but that's just not the case. Their is no "WHO laboratory" etc, there are just specialists from participating countries that share their own labs data (or not). To change that, it would need more funding (not less!) to own its own labs, facilities, research programs, etc.

Curious question: what does the WHO do with all of the funding it gets? It receives funding from many nations and individuals, in no small amount. If it doesn't have labs to do testing... What exactly does it do with that funding?

After searching on WHO site, it seems that they do surveys of each countries health system, and pushing them to develop steady healthcare systems, and to adapt their practices to available medical knowledge. The pushing of WHO to develop healthcare available including to the poorest may have been what Trump disliked, after all.

The WHO seems to compensate partly for the absence of universal healthcare in the poorest countries, by direct investment.

I suspect that it is also directed towards communication and information. Like teaching the developping world the known techniques to mitigate malaria, the primary hygienic gestures's importance (like using soap to wash hands), etc. And of course the importance to have protected sex to fend off AIDS, etc. (which is an upstream battle given the religious and traditions resistance to many of these advises)

Interesting, thanks for the summary. I had no idea they did direct investment, though that seems like the only way to improve health in some parts of the world.

> And of course the importance to have protected sex to fend off AIDS, etc. (which is an upstream battle given the religious and traditions resistance to many of these advises)

Like when the Republicans wasted billions of dollars promoting abstinence as the solution to AIDS:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/05/03/4766011...

That's happens when launching one-sided projects from some particular country's ideology, instead of going through consensual WHO projects.

The AIDS projects from WHO would never dare consider abstinence. They already have the hardest job countering all the traditions and superstitions, even for the simplest thing as not to kiss the dead relatives, so how could they succeed in asking people not to have sex?

> don't we need a centralized touchstone for these kinds of crises?

This is like saying the governors should be ceding control to the federal administration.

Imagine if the virus came along during the Hillary administration. The not-dismantled pandemic team [1] catches wind of the problems in Wuhan as early as the beginning of January, and informs the President as well as the WHO. The still-functioning State Department asks around in China and brings good information. As the WHO encounters resistance in China [2], the secretary of state makes phone calls and manages to negotiate permission for them to do their work there (who knows, maybe in reality Pompeo did this, but their track record makes me doubt that).

In this universe though, the Trump admin didn't contribute anything to the WHO (I'm assuming), and is now bitching and moaning that they were ineffective...

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/trump-turns-...:

> Announcing the cut in funding on Tuesday, Trump accused the WHO of failing to send its experts to the source of the outbreak to gather samples. That failure decisively set back the effect to contain the pandemic, he claimed.

> In fact Beijing blocked a WHO delegation from visiting Wuhan in the first weeks of the outbreak. The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had to fly to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping on 29 January to negotiate entry and information sharing. A WHO team was allowed to visit Wuhan on 22 February.