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Trump threatens to take US out of WHO entirely and stop all funding:
In a letter to WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Trump alleged that "the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world" and that the WHO must "demonstrate independence from China."
"[I]f the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization," Trump wrote. "I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America's interests."
Trump posted the letter on Twitter, writing, "It is self-explanatory!"
Trump has repeatedly denied any responsibility for COVID-19 spreading in America and said on April 14 that the US would temporarily halt funding the WHO until his administration completed a review of the group's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump's letter yesterday said that "review has confirmed many of the serious concerns I raised last month and identified others that the World Health Organization should have addressed, especially the World Health Organization's alarming lack of independence from the People's Republic of China."
[...] Trump's letter then lists a series of claims, the first being that the WHO "consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal."
The Lancet quickly issued a response explaining that Trump is wrong. "This statement is factually incorrect," The Lancet said. "The Lancet published no report in December, 2019, referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China." The Lancet's first reports on the topic were published on January 24, 2020 the statement said.
[...] Trump's letter yesterday said, "Throughout this crisis, the World Health Organization has been curiously insistent on praising China for its alleged 'transparency.'" Trump's letter did not mention that Trump himself praised China for its "transparency" on January 24 or that Trump repeatedly praised China for its coronavirus response throughout February.
[...] Health experts say Trump's travel ban had little effect on the pandemic's spread. Trump continued to downplay the virus's severity by comparing it to the flu as late as March 24, nearly two months after the WHO declared a global health emergency. Trump has also fought state governors over their cautious approaches to reopening the economy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:40PM (3 children)
We can all hope that we will have a vaccine for COVID-19 soon. There's reason to be optimistic that when we have that vaccine, it will be less dangerous than the seasonal flu.
Unfortunately, we don't live in that time yet. 90K deaths in 3 months is definitively worse than 60K deaths in 12 months. Maybe it will be better in the future, maybe not. But it's at least 50% worse in 2020, which happens to be the year we are currently living in. We still don't know how bad the rest of the year will be.
By the way, we also don't shelter in place for the seasonal flu. That 90K happened despite massive attempts to reduce the infection rate. I shudder to think how many would have died without it.
One more point: the COVID-19 numbers are actually conservative estimates compared to the flu numbers. We have a lot more experience detecting and treating the flu, so we can be a lot more confident about how many cases there were that were never treated or even diagnosed. By contrast, most COVID-19 numbers being collected are limited to confirmed positive laboratory test results. Even organizations which were reporting suspected cases are starting to water down their numbers so that they can compare apples to apples with everyone else. 90K is the number of people who A) thought they had the disease, B) went to a hospital for the disease, C) were able to receive a laboratory test for the disease, and D) died of the disease after a positive test result. Especially considering the difficulty still involved in getting tested in the US, that number is definitely lower than the actual death toll.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 22 2020, @02:08PM (2 children)
We can not. Vaccines generally take in the neighborhood of five years, though there are pie in the sky claims from some pharma companies of maybe one year for a covid-19 vaccine. One year of the economy being shut down or even seriously stifled and we will be going full Alex Jones and eating our neighbors.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday May 22 2020, @06:20PM (1 child)
Let me see if I'm following the argument correctly. You assert that COVID-19 is not significantly worse than the seasonal flu. You assert that continued quarantine will lead to the breakdown of society. Combining those two assertions, you propose that continued quarantine is actually worse than COVID-19 would be without quarantine.
You've completely ignored my argument that COVID-19 actually is significantly worse than the seasonal flu, so I'll assume you're backing down on that claim. Let's talk about the second assertion.
Continued quarantine doesn't need to look like it does right now, even without a vaccine. With the right logistics and cooperation, the US could join the countries with enough tests and PPE to safely allow small gatherings. Large gatherings like sports games and concerts will still be on hold, and office workers would need to work remotely as much as possible, but we could go out and get haircuts, maybe even go to church again.
On top of that, research is likely to find that antibodies confer immunity, providing a limited avenue for producing vaccines from plasma and enabling previously infected people to resume normal life. Additionally, we are already finding treatments in the interim which reduce the mortality rate and the strain on hospitals.
So it's likely that within a year, society will stabilize, and Alex Jones will need to find some other reason to justify cannibalism.
The proposal that we end quarantine now, however, relies on an assumption: that COVID-19 without quarantine would not itself lead to the breakdown of society. This assumption is also false.
During the quarantine, the regular economy is basically in moth balls, at least as much as creditors will allow. At the end of all this, people can mostly go back to doing what they were doing before.
That all changes if the mortality rate skyrockets. I'm not just talking deaths directly caused by COVID-19, but unnecessary deaths caused by COVID-19 overwhelming the health care system. We're already past 90,000 in just 3 months, and the death rate is still accelerating. Nobody wants to predict the total death count anymore, but as I recall early estimates put it somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million.
What do you think that kind of death rate is going to do to the economy? Those people aren't going back to work. This pandemic, despite our best efforts, is still going to take hundreds of thousands of people away from jobs, away from relatives who have their own responsibilities, away from friends. It's going to leave a lot of places understaffed and depressed.
How much worse could it be without quarantine? I wish I could say. I've already failed to find a simpler statistic, so I'm not going to bother looking for this one. I think it's fair to assume, though, that an order of magnitude more people would die.
You lose too many people, and society will begin to break down. It's not just about the economy. It's about lives. It's about families, communities, and institutions that are formed of individual people. Too many of those people die, and those organizations start to fail.
Do you get it? Too many farmers, truckers, and retailers die, and there won't be enough food on the shelves. Too many people die, and Alex Jones will be back to eating his neighbors again.
Of course, people like Alex Jones and all the assholes refusing to wear masks may just force the issue. Enough of those people breaking quarantine out of spite, and we'll get the worst of both worlds: a limping economy due to isolation, but without enough people left alive to reconstitute it.
None of which addresses the obvious moral issues with trading literal human lives for abstract economics. Clearly, though, some people just don't care. I'm starting to wonder whether Alex Jones was really just waiting for an excuse to resort to cannibalism.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:46PM
No, I've refuted your argument that coronaids is worse than the seasonal flu. The flu kills up to 60K people every year in a few months when there's a vaccine and effective treatments for it, while coronaids can barely manage a 50% increase without a vaccine or effective treatment over the same timespan. That tells me that it may be highly communicable but it's not nearly as deadly.
I flat out state that continued quarantine will eventually lead to the complete collapse of the economy. You cannot shut down 80% (or even 50%) of the economy and expect the infrastructure held up by it to continue chugging along indefinitely. You'd lose food production, distribution, utilities of all sorts, manufacturing, housing, nearly every last service industry... And then you'd lose the government because you cannot print your way out of complete, engineered economic collapse and people will not stand for the feds trying to and failing, regardless of their intentions. With the government goes any remaining value in their fiat currency, which means all the rich people you would have said could shoulder the burden are now just as broke as you.
Already has found. We ran a story on it recently.
No, it is not. You can not hit pause on an economy. Not even for a short time. Creditors are not evil bankers trying to get all of the moneys. Creditors are mostly motherfuckers that want to eat this month too. That money you give them every month doesn't go into some Scrooge McDuck swimming vault, it mostly goes to pay their employees and their own creditors, recurse as necessary until you see how fucking fragile this shit is.
There is no moral issue with that. Far more people will die in the event of an economic collapse than coronaids could account for even if we did absolutely nothing and no vaccine/treatment was ever discovered.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.