"Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne
Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic."
I mean, I don't believe the WHO actually stated that in those terms. This is probably a paraphrase of a more nuanced statement that erases the nuance.
https://time.com/6162065/covid-19-airborne-transmission-conf...
>FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.
>The #coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks.
The WHO was unequivocally stating that Covid was not airborne, apparently meaning that they (wrongly) thought it was not spread through aerosols. Instead, they were saying it was spread through droplets. So they were wrong about how it spreads, but did not go as far as saying it wasn't spread through respiratory routes/air at all, which I think might be some people's interpretation of "The WHO said it was not airborne."
I can remember scientists being accused of spreading "misinformation" for proposing that airborne spread best fit the available data.
For instance, at the beginning of the pandemic, passengers of the cruise ship Diamond Princess continued to spread Covid from cabin to cabin while locked down.
There was also the case of a church choir practice where over 50 people caught Covid.
>If COVID-19 could spread so thoroughly and quickly through a choir, did that mean the coronavirus was airborne? And if the primary route for the disease’s spread was through the air, had our initial response been woefully misguided?
For researchers like Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, the answer was clear: The coronavirus is airborne, and the superspreader choir proved it.
Once agencies like the WHO established the position that COVID-19 was spread primarily through heavy droplets, it was a tall order to change it. “They’ll die defending their view,” one anonymous WHO consultant told the New York Times in July. Even now, “the burden of proof is much higher for aerosols than for any other route, and yet we have more evidence for aerosols in this case than for any other route,” Marr told me.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/coronavirus-airborne-de...
This is a much lower bar. You can always find a crank on twitter accusing something of being misinformation.
The original claim I responded to was that the medical establishment claimed airborne transmission was impossible. However, the actual take from the medical establishment was significantly less confident of that claim (emphasis added):
> Airborne spread was “not believed to be a major driver of transmission based on available evidence,” the report [from May 2020] stated.
The WHO literally made a blanket statement that Covid was NOT airborne.
> FACT: COVID-19 is NOT airborne.
The CDC also denied airborne spread for quite some time.
>As the pandemic unfolded last year, infectious disease experts warned for months that both the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization were overlooking research that strongly suggested the coronavirus traveled aloft in small, airborne particles. Several scientists on Friday welcomed the agency’s scrapping of the term “close contact,” which they criticized as vague and said did not necessarily capture the nuances of aerosol transmission.
“C.D.C. has now caught up to the latest scientific evidence, and they’ve gotten rid of some old problematic terms and thinking about how transmission occurs,” said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/health/coronavirus-airbor...
The CDC's flip flopping on the issue did not inspire confidence.
>CDC reverses again, now says Covid-19 is 'sometimes' airborne
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai...
If you read charitably and look at their longer, contemporaneous statements, they say things like airborne spread is possible in some limited situations but not believed to be a significant vector of spread at a population level. (Still wrong, but a lot more nuanced.)
March 2020 was the first month the disease was declared a pandemic; it was very early on. We had a broad call to recognize airborne spread by July. It's worth skimming something like https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments... .
It’s a lie. There are no excuses. It’s false.
You cannot say “Dreyfus is guilty” if you haven’t studied the subject. If an institution has credit, it’s because they have a proven track of not saying total bullshit.
The same for the president of France who said “Please go to the theaters to fight against the Covid”. He knew it was contagious, so he was giving the order to people to infect themselves, wrapped in a lie.
If they can say the opposite of truth, without having conducted proper studies and acknowledged what was obvious to everyone, then they are directly responsible for harming the public.
The WHO should be dissoluted.
I'm not sure why you would make such a misguided claim.
>Two years after the pandemic began, we finally have a good understanding of how COVID-19 is transmitted: some infected people exhale virus in small, invisible particles (aerosols). These do not fall quickly to the ground, but move in the air like cigarette smoke. Other people can get infected when breathing in those aerosols, either in close proximity, in shared room air, or less frequently, at a distance. But the journey to accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of how COVID-19 spread was far too slow and contentious. Even today, the updated guidance and policies of how to protect ourselves remain haphazardly applied
https://time.com/6162065/covid-19-airborne-transmission-conf...
I remember droplets being the leading theory but do not remember a time when the medical establishment was claiming airborne transmission couldn't be real.