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China Medicine

China Has Been Trying To Avoid Fallout From Coronavirus. Now 100 Countries Are Pushing for an Investigation (cnn.com) 197

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
Russian President Vladimir Putin once called Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, a "lone warrior." Putin was joking, but that description is starting to look more and more accurate. Russia has joined about 100 countries in backing a resolution at the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA), calling for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The European Union-drafted resolution comes on the back of a push by Australia for an inquiry into China's initial handling of the crisis. That was met with an angry response from Beijing, which accused Canberra of a "highly irresponsible" move that could "disrupt international cooperation in fighting the pandemic and goes against people's shared aspiration." While the resolution to be presented at the annual meeting of World Health Organization (WHO) members, which begins on Monday in Geneva, does not single out China or any other country, it calls for an "impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation" of "the (WHO)-coordinated international health response to Covid-19."

The wording of the resolution is weak compared to Australia's previous calls for a probe into China's role and responsibility in the origin of the pandemic. This may have been necessary to get a majority of WHO member states to sign on -- particularly those, such as Russia, with traditionally strong ties to Beijing. But that doesn't mean China's government should rest easy. The potential for an independent probe, even one not initially tasked with investigating an individual country's response, to turn up damning or embarrassing information is great. Australian government sources told the ABC, the country's public broadcaster, that the resolution's language was sufficiently strong to "ensure that a proper and thorough investigation took place."
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China Has Been Trying To Avoid Fallout From Coronavirus. Now 100 Countries Are Pushing for an Investigation More

China Has Been Trying To Avoid Fallout From Coronavirus. Now 100 Countries Are Pushing for an Investigation

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  • Yes, unfortunately (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Captivale ( 6182564 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @02:29PM (#60074762)

    according to public news owned by giant corporations with billion dollar interests in producing media for the Chinese market, noticing where pandemics come from is now racist.

    • Actually, it is nationalist. But in the US, that word has strangely lost its bad connotation.

      Instead, "racist" has become the catch-all term, so much so, that I would bet money that only a hand full of Americans knows what the word actually means.

      Let't test that: Racism is defined as the idea that there is such a thing as human races. A former scientific hypothesis, with no particularly positive or negative connotation per se, that has now been debunked for about 100 years. (Because genetic variation inside

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        But in the US, that word has strangely lost its bad connotation.

        It's only strange if you haven't noticed the globalist clown/shitworld we've allowed our establishment to foist on us.

        Not that that sort of ignorance is rare. Yay groupthink.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Local ID10T ( 790134 )

        Actually, it is nationalist. But in the US, that word has strangely lost its bad connotation.

        That's because we are not German. To you, nationalist => national socialist => NAZI => world domination & genocide.

        To us, nationalist is self care. First you take care of your self, then your family, your friends, your neighbors, your tribe, your countrymen, the world. This is the basis for "Think global, act local", and "Charity begins at home".

        Don't forget the mistakes of your past... but grow beyond them.

        • Re: Yes, unfortunately (Score:4, Interesting)

          by U0K ( 6195040 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @05:09PM (#60075374)
          The irony is that Nazis were as much national and socialists as contemporary North Korea is a Democratic People's Republic.

          As far as I understand my European history, nationalism was first made to be 'thing' after the first the French Revolution. They weren't particular about ethnicity and for example granted honorary citizenship to a wider range of ethnicities. What made people "French" in their eyes were their actions rather than their parents.


          But still today most Germans seem to know only one type of nationalism - ethnic nationalism.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Nationalism is about dividing the world into two groups: in and out. The definitions are arbitrary, a line on a map or a racial group, the only requirement is that they can easily be identified and the out group blamed for everything that is wrong.

          • You are falling into a globalist self-destructive trap over your guilt that a couple centuries ago your nation was "The British Empire".

            You won't improve the world by destroying your home.

            • You won't improve it by arbitrary include and exclude people by something as ridiculous as what cunt they plopped out of. Being born to someone is not by any stretch of imagination an achievement or something that should include or exclude you from a group.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DeVilla ( 4563 )

            For the sake of discussion, let assume you are correct for the moment. What's the word for what the person your were replying to was describing? `Cause that's what he means when he refers to socialism. Would you please teach us the correct word for that?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Socialism isn't a focus on self care, it's about working together for social good. The clue is in the name.

              What the GP describes is a spin put on nationalism to try to make it sound acceptable. Just looking our for your family doesn't seem like a bad thing until you start looking at what that actually means in practice.

        • What? I'm not German and Nationalism does not equal "self-care" to me. Isolationism does, but isolationism and Nationalism are not the same. They can overlap, certainly, but they are distinct.

      • "Nationalist" did not hold a negative connotation until after WW2 when a bunch of pansies thought that rolling all nations under a single world authority was a genuine and fruitful idea.

      • You're that Time Cube guy aren't you?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      No but it is racist to assume that people of that race are the only ones that carry it, and that it magically instantly affected everyone of that race regardless of where they resided, oh and also that eating their (Americanized) food is somehow also a vector any more than any other kind of food.
    • This investigation is of the international effort, and the WHO's role in particular. The original request by Australia was, "Look over there! Let's all scapegoat China." but if this investigation is conducted properly then a lot of governments, including Australia's, are going to look bad. Of course, at that point they'll just declare that the investigators were corrupted by China.

      As for racism: racist people are racist. They're not hard to spot anymore, they've had a lot of encouragement and have gotten

    • conflating race with the country to shut down conversation.

    • according to public news owned by giant corporations with billion dollar interests in producing media for the Chinese market, noticing where pandemics come from is now racist.

      [Citation please] Where has the public news said this? You may have misinterpreted it because you think it's right to call a virus Wuflu or Chinese virus rather than its official name. If so you're no different than someone who calls a black person "niger" [sic because Slashdot is lame] because they are black instead of saying calling them ... Anthony.

  • Pot calling kettle black? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by enigma32 ( 128601 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @02:37PM (#60074792)

    On Friday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman accused those countries who back Taiwan's participation as seeking "selfish political gains even at the expense of hijacking the WHA and undermining global anti-pandemic cooperation." He predicted that the proposal would be "firmly rejected by the vast majority of the international community."

    So the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman is accusing countries supporting Taiwan's inclusion as pursuing "selfish political gains".... even while the only real opposition to their inclusion is pushed by China? Seems a bit disingenuous, at best, to be making claims like these. Taiwan has been universally acclaimed for their handling of the coronavirus situation, so I don't see any clear reason why they shouldn't be involved with the international health community, other than it being hurtful to China's pride.

  • Ground Zero (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @02:38PM (#60074800) Journal

    After the world is thrown into semi-Armageddon, of course many are quite curious to know how it actually started.

    China should grow up, admit they fucked up, and come clean. I know it's against dictator habit, but this won't die. Similar applies to responses by many other nations' leaders.

    Perhaps make a deal with China that if they come clean, there will be no sanctions and punishment for it, or at least limit it.

    Why is it so hard for many just to admit they screwed up? I trust somebody who admits to mistakes more so than somebody with an apparently clean record. We are all human and nothing can hide that.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MancunianMaskMan ( 701642 )
      OK the virus originated there, and they were initially slow to respond to it (for about the same time as officials were slow here in UK, in the US, and elsewhere, where it's playing out right now.

      But could they have stopped it in its tracks completely? I doubt it. The experts in WHO are going to come to a conclusion and if it's the one I suggest here, some in other countries are not going to be happy about it, because they seek to attach blame to someone.

      • Re:Ground Zero (Score:5, Informative)

        by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @03:13PM (#60074912)

        But could they have stopped it in its tracks completely? I doubt it. The experts in WHO are going to come to a conclusion and if it's the one I suggest here, some in other countries are not going to be happy about it, because they seek to attach blame to someone.

        Well, there is handling a pandemic outbreak in a way that may be seen later as not the best, but it was done in good faith, and then there is Locking up and threatening the doctor who identified the outbreak and forcing him to confess his “crimes” against the state for raising the alarm [nytimes.com] while doing nothing for a month level of fuck up. So even if this wasn’t engineered (vast consensus was it is not engineered) nor escaped from a lab (experts all say this seems unlikely at best) then the real issue here is China has its authoritarian head so far up its own ass it not only screwed itself, but the world at large. If we had containment started back in late December when Dr. Wengliang first realized what was happening at the very least we would have pushed the whole thing back and slowed it’s spread and thus lessened the damage to blood and treasure of just about every last other country on the planet. It may even have been containable if a complete lockdown of Wuhan happened in December, though the asymptomatic nature of many who are sick does make that a long shot.

        • Sure, China fucked up at the beginning. We might also have been slow to react -- it was not obvious in the beginning that Covid-19 would be so bad.

          But by early January the Covid-19 story was widely known.

          Yet somehow the USA ended up with over 10 times as many cases per million than China. And they had a good month's warning.

          That is the really amazing part of this story, and one that I would not have expected. And that part was not China's fault.

          https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]

          • It wasn’t early January, early public reports were saying it wasn’t contagious person to person and the term “coronavirus” wasn’t used in the news until Jan 12th, it was called SARS. In reality, it was a blip on the public world radar by Jan 20th and didn’t start to make headlines outside China until the lockdown on the 23rd. If people knew there was a lockdown coming they would flee in mass just like Americans from Europe who clogged up in airports, cheek to jowl, for

        • Your source says no such thing. After signing a statement on Jan 3 agreeing not to "spread rumours", he went home that same day, and straight back to work (where he contracted Covid-19 from an asymptomatic glaucoma patient on Jan 8). He was not detained or even fined.

          Linked from the NYT article, in his own words [oeeee.com]:

          Li Wenliang: At 5:00 pm on December 30, 2019, I posted a text in the WeChat group of university classmates, “7 SARS diagnosed in the South China Seafood and Fruit Market”. I also sent a message in the follow-up group to emphasize that the virus typing is in progress, everyone should not pass it on, and let family members and relatives pay attention to prevention. On January 3, I was informed that the police station filled out an admonition.

          The disciplinary book shows that the illegal behavior is the publication of untrue statements on the Internet. At that time, I thought that it would be good not to be detained, so I signed it directly.

          After this happened, I still work normally in the hospital.

          I saw someone online saying that I was "revoked for a license". I need to clarify this. I had been working in the hospital until I was sick, and my revoked license was untrue.

          The Chinese government notified the WHO on December 31st [who.int], one day after Li sent his messages. At that time there were only the 7 known cases Li refers to, no deaths, no knowledge of cause, and no in

      • There is a disproportionate responsibility on the first people to discover a virus to take action to stop its spread. Stopping it can only happen very early on before it becomes endemic in the population.

        While the initial 6 week screw up by the US executive branch shows a miserable failure, it is not nearly as harmful as even 2 weeks lost in China early on.

      • Part of the problem is their live meat markets though. It's not just by chance that the China is the source for a disproportionate number of the modern pandemics (avian flu, SARS, COVID-19).

        They have to regulate the health and safety practices of their markets to a better degree to keep these things from cropping up in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sebby ( 238625 )

      Perhaps make a deal with China that if they come clean, there will be no sanctions and punishment for it, or at least limit it.

      And then....

      Why is it so hard for many just to admit they screwed up?

      I think you sorta answered it yourself - ego.

      They don't want to admin to anything (just look at G.W.B, or Trump), especially if it's going to make them look weak(er), or get them any sort of sanctions.

    • The virus was first discovered in Wuhan by Chinese doctors at December 27. Just like the Spanish flu pandemic [wikipedia.org] was mistakenly attributed to Spain due to the USA suppressing reporting of epidenic in order to fight World War I, it is wrong to assumed that the virus was originated there. And there are growing evidences pointing other possibilities:

      1. Two Seattle area residents tested positive for COVID-19 and were sick (only) in last December [seattletimes.com]
      2. Italian scientists investigate possible earlier emergence of corona

      • typo: "corrected from December" => "collected from December"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mestar ( 121800 )

        f) There was a World Military Games event in Wuhan in October, 10.000 people from all around the world were there, any of them could have brought the virus to Wuhan.

        Blaming China for Corona would be the same as blaming Sweden for Chernobyl radiation. (They detected it first.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mestar ( 121800 )

          If this theory was true, we would see lots of cases in military bases all around the world. I guess we didn't see that, so this is nothing more than a stupid conspiracy theory that is wrong.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Sanctions are only for little countries. For big countries it's called a trade war because if you put sanctions on them they can hurt you as much or more in retaliation.

      If you want China to cooperate you need to rule out assigning blame and any kind of punishment. In most legal systems the accused is not obliged to assist with their own prosecution, is unreasonable to expect them to.

  • It didn't play out well for them (Score:3)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @02:42PM (#60074816)

    China plan years ago:

    1) Install a puppet in the WHO that caters to you:https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/1/world-health-organization-and-its-leader-play-chin/ [washingtontimes.com]

    2 ) Control the information (don't want to look bad)

    3) Profit

    Plan that was implemented:

    1) Install Puppet (check)
    2) Control information, horde supplies (just in case), don't let other countries know how bad it is
    3) Make the whole world distrust you.

    • 1) Install a puppet in the WHO that caters to you

      Ooooh I know the answer to this one: America! Yeah USA the country which supported the WHO's primary charter to only be able to report on facts presented by official government bodies.

      As we've been over this 100 times already, please learn what the WHO is, does, it's purpose, and it's limitations before declaring them some kind of sock-puppet. Otherwise you just look ignorant.

  • In over their head (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18, 2020 @03:12PM (#60074908)

    China is in over their head. They are used to having absolute dictatorial control inside China. They are used to buying off or blackmailing individuals outside their country. Want access to their market? You had better appease the CCP and their official worldview. Want to keep your family members back in China alive and make sure they do not disappear? The Chinese government uses mob tactics against people they don't like.

    The problem they have is they unleashed the Wuhan virus (that is what the Chinese people in China call it) on the world. They covered it up and lied about it thinking that they could control the narrative outside their borders based on their experience with multi-billion dollar corporations. The problem is that they cannot do that at scale. They CCP fucked over the entire world's economy with their greed and their lies.

    They have discovered that the threat to withhold access to the world's largest market does not mean anything to small businesses or the unemployed. Their are a whole lot more people employed by small businesses than multi-billion corporations. Then you have all of the unemployed that have lost family members. They can never stand against the world, or even a fair chunk of it.

    The problem is that they miscalculated how much economic damage would be done and how many lives would be taken. China has well over a billion people, they can afford to sacrifice a few hundred thousand of their own. They failed to understand that other countries value their citizens much more than China does.

    They caused trillions of dollars in economic damages worldwide through their lies. They killed hundreds of thousands of people. Many more will be killed. It's past time to hold the CCP accountable. China lied, people died. Demand reparations, reforms and stop buying things made in China!

  • Lightning rod issue (Score:3)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @03:17PM (#60074926)

    Pointing fingers at a WHO inquiry will probably make countries feel better, but hopefully this pandemic taught countries that strategic levels of manufacturing should be kept domestically so they can be called upon in an emergency.

    I live in NY, and from Day 1 the biggest concern was that NYC would have all 11 million people ignoring the request to stay away from each other, spreading this far and wide, causing a mini version of Part 1 of The Stand. Fortunately the worst of the chaos they thought would happen didn't, but priority one was finding enough medical supplies to deal with the possibility that we'd need to warehouse hundreds of thousands of hospital patients. The one thing that isn't bound up in all the blame game was the fact that China is almost the sole source for some of the basic supplies.

    From an IT perspective, since we're nerds and stuff...the idea of lessons learned and putting in systems in place to make sure issues never happen again is out of fashion. That was ITIL, now we're Agile. But, we can't be so Agile that we just throw out the safeties and margins of error. The Agile folks chafe at the ITIL people because they don't want to go through the hoops required to get things done. "Why do I have to certify that I checked the SQL statement because Bob dropped the production database last year?" Having at least some sort of investigation and finding of facts might at least make people think about how to make things less crazy next time...and yes, put in some sort of mitigation plan.

    • Personally, I hope that is not the lesson. Supplies were never the issue* in the NY mess, lack of early action at the state and local levels was.

      *PPE for healthcare workers is a different category IMO. Hospital supply strategies clearly are not well suited for a pandemic, and I think a big part of that is single-use equipment for maintaining sterile conditions. When you run through that many masks because they are only used for 30 minutes each, you are bound to have a problem if there are any supply disr

      • In the SF Bay Area, hospitals are required to build up a 30-day supply of PPE before we can re-open (in addition to other things).

    • Pointing fingers at a WHO inquiry will probably make countries feel better

      They should feel worse given it's precisely "countries" which signed on to the WHO's charter that prevents the WHO being political, which in this case means the WHO is only able to comment on and pass on analysis on official government data.

      People like blaming the WHO forgetting how they are setup, and ignoring that the WHO made the only comments they could given the data they were allowed to use.

  • China Bully (Score:4, Insightful)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @03:26PM (#60074960)

    China has shown its true colours buy bullying Australia over calling for an investigation by banning meat imports and threatening trade sanctions.
    The point of the inquiry is not to assign blame, but find out how the world should best practice deal with disease outbreaks..... now if China was found to have leaked this from a lab, then there be some negligence consequences but I would say all tracks are now destroyed or covered up. If China wants to save face with the world, they should be open and transparent. Their current behaviour will alienate them from future trade.

    • China has shown its true colours buy bullying Australia over calling for an investigation by banning meat imports and threatening trade sanctions.

      Latest news is, of course, that they've gone from "threatening" to full-on sanctions. Comes in the form of an 80% tariff on Australian barley... about $1B in trade. Punishment for instigating the inquiry. I suspect the punishment will not stop there, either.

  • wuhan today

    people with more history knowledge will certainly have more examples

    what i'm trying to say is this won't change. I'm afraid it can not change. "Our" best bet is to operate under this assumption.

    So far, one could say we're somewhat lucky it was this bad, not worse. Lucky... fortunate? Those are synonyms, aren't they?

  • Gov. (NY) Andrew Cuomo tried to start a "European virus" meme:

    “If you had said when we started this, yes we have more cases than anyone else, yes we had this European virus attack us, and nobody expected it, but we are not only going to change our trajectory, we're going to change the trajectory more dramatically than anyplace else in the nation”.

  • That's weird (Score:3)

    by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Monday May 18, 2020 @04:57PM (#60075308) Homepage

    All the best and brightest have told me that it's Trump who's trying to focus blame on China in order to distract from his total failures here at home (which, oddly, are on par with the rest of the world).

    • Do you have ESP? [whohasesp.com]

      It's really hard to find the memory cell holding the correct card, you need to make it more obvious, at least say where the server is. But even then it's tough, searching through all those memory cells to find the right one.

      • I'm a bastard. I use rot-13 encoding, so even if you find the memory cell, it won't help.

        • Oh great, now I have to do math in my mind? The ESP is easy, but the math is going to kill me. Maybe if I used a pencil and paper I might be able to do it.....

          • Oh great, now I have to do math in my mind? The ESP is easy, but the math is going to kill me. Maybe if I used a pencil and paper I might be able to do it.....

            By the way, on a serious note one of the funny things about that site is that there have been around 235,000 guesses over the years, and the average correct is 19.93%. Oddly, the square is guessed correctly the least (19.22%), and the circle is guessed correctly the most (20.36%).

  • “China Has Been Trying To Avoid Fallout From Coronavirus. Now 100 Countries Are Pushing for an Investigation”

    A fake headline that is not representive of the actual resolution.

    “Initiate, at the earliest appropriate moment, and in consultation with Member States, 1 a stepwise process of impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation .. and make recommendations to improve global pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacity” ref [who.int]

    I do know it isn't the best cours

  • The recent discovery that someone in France had it and was at the pneumonia stage on December 27th and that he had to have gotten it in France indicates that the virus was out of China by some point likely in early December. It is very likely we'll find earlier cases assuming we keep looking (authorities might not want to find them).

    So Wuhan's handling of the virus in the three weeks or so before the Chinese government took over and stomped all over the local efforts to conceal it is irrelevant. The virus already escaped containment.

    Many experts think that we'll likely trace it back to an origin in September or so with community spread escaping both Wuhan and China before anyone even suspected an issue.

    In looking forward, we should first ask ourselves why we care whether another country gave us any warning. Why would we be dependent on other country's warnings to protect our citizens? If they had hit every panic button possible on the 1st of January, would the outcome have been any different?

    I think it very unlikely that we would have locked down anything other than Asian travel. Most of the cases we have, especially the ones in NYC, are from a variation that probably came in from France.

    I can't imagine the current administration doing anything other than reacting after the fact when it is too late just as they did.

  • Accidents unfortunately happen but we should learn and try to do better. Global neighbors cooperate since in mutual interests. While it would be ideal if an objective review could help us learn and improve, due to politics potential for witch-hunt spin high. China weariness understandable. Better pandemic prevention and reaction systems hopefully evolve. Few were pushing before the Covid-19, much like the Fukushima Tepco Execs who balked at stronger tsunami counter measures. oh it will not happen at least n

  • So let's imagine we find out that they are "guilty", whatever that means? Then what? Freeze their international assets until they cough up some kind of "punishment money"? Knowing China they'll simply cash in every single foreign corporate asset in their country (which as you might imagine is quite a bit). How long you think 'til our governments cave in to the demands of various corporations to drop the bullshit so they can get their stuff back?

    Not to mention that China basically holds everyone's economy ho

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