Comment by diego_sandoval
5 months ago
At the time, YouTube said: “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.” [1] which, in my opinion, is a pretty extreme stance to take, especially considering that the WHO contradicted itself many times during the pandemic.
> the WHO contradicted itself many times during the pandemic
Did they? I remember them revising their guidance, which seems like something one would expect during an emerging crisis, but I don't remember them directly contradicting themselves.
As super low hanging fruit:
June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0]
June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1]
0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac...
Of course, if we just take the most recent thing they said as "revised guidance", I guess it's impossible for them to contradict themselves. Just rapidly re-re-re-revised guidance.
The difference between a contradiction and a revision is the difference between parallel and serial.
I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.
Obviously, rapid revisions during a period of emerging data makes YouTube's policy hard to enforce fairly. Do you remove things that were in line with the WHO when they were published? When they were made? Etc
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OK and if you said something that you later realised to be wrong, would you be contradicting yourself by correcting it? What should they have done in this situation? People do make mistakes, speak out of turn, say the wrong thing sometimes; I don't think we should criticise someone in that position who subsequently fixes their error. And within a couple of days in this case! That's a good thing. They screwed up and then fixed it. What am I missing here?
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Is there a difference between an expert opinion in the midst of a pandemic and an organizational recommendation?
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they also changed the symptoms definitions, so ...
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> Did they?
They said it was a fact that COVID is NOT airborne. (It is.)
Not they believed it wasn't airborne.
Not that data was early but indicated it wasn't airborne.
That it was fact.
In fact, they published fact checks on social media asserting that position. Here is one example on the official WHO Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935/?locale=...
None of that argues that they contradicted themselves. You and several others have just hijacked this thread to pile on the WHO.
Argue that they were incompetent in their handling of it, sure, whatever. That's not the comment you're replying to.
Some WHO reports were suggesting that lockdowns do more harm than good as early as late 2020.
Don't forget that they ban-hammered anyone who advanced the lab leak theory because a global entity was pulling the strings at the WHO. I first heard about Wuhan in January of 2020 from multiple Chinese nationals who were talking about the leak story they were seeing in uncensored Chinese media and adamant that the state media story was BS. As soon as it blew up by March, Western media was manipulated into playing the bigotry angle to suppress any discussion of what may have happened.
I believe having Trump as president exacerbated many, many things during that time, and this is one example. He was quick to start blaming the "Chinese", he tried to turn it into a reason to dislike China and Chinese people, because he doesn't like China, and he's always thinking in terms of who he likes and dislikes. This made it hard to talk about the lab leak hypothesis without sounding like you were following Trump in that. If we had had a more normal president, I don't think this and other issues would have been as polarized, and taking nuanced stances would have been more affordable.
My memory is that the "lab leak" stuff I saw back then was all conspiracy theories about how it was a Chinese bioweapon.
Eventually I started seeing some serious discussion about how it might have been accidentally created through gain of function research.
I’m undecided on the issue, but… if I were trying to cover up an accidental lab leak I’d spread a story that it was a giant conspiracy to create a bio weapon. For extra eye rolls I’d throw in some classic foil hat tropes like the New World Order or the International Bankers.
If it was a lab leak, by far the most likely explanation is that someone pricked themselves or caught a whiff of something.
A friend of mine who lived in China for a while and is familiar with the hustle culture there had his own hypothesis. Some low level techs who were being given these bats and other lab animals to euthanize and incinerate were like “wait… we could get some money for these over at the wet market!”
> My memory is that the "lab leak" stuff I saw back then was all conspiracy theories about how it was a Chinese bioweapon.
No, that was just the straw man circulated in your echo chamber to dismiss discussion. To be clear, there were absolutely people who believed that, but the decision to elevate the nonsense over the serious discussion is how partisan echo chambers work.
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I called this out in this thread and was immediately downvoted
> because a global entity was pulling the strings at the WHO'
excuse me I'm sorry what?
Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source. There is a debate out there for 100k to prove this. Check it out.
> Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source.
A novel coronavirus outbreak happens at the exact location as a lab performing gain of function research on coronaviruses... but yeah, suggesting a lab leak is outlandish, offensive even, and you should be censored for even mentioning that as a possibility. Got it.
This line of thinking didn't make sense then and still doesn't make sense now.
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> There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source
Because WHO worked with CPC to bury evidence and give clean chit to wuhan lab. There was some pressure building up then for international teams to visit wuhan lab and examine data transparently. But, with thorough ban of lab leak theory, WHO visited china and gave clean chit without even visiting wuhan lab or having access to lab records. The only place that could prove this definitively buried all records.
The topic at hand is not whether it's a bold claim to make. The question is: should organizations that control a large portion of the world's communication channels have the ability to unilaterally define the tone and timber of a dialog surrounding current events?
To the people zealously downvoting all of these replies: defend yourselves. What about this is not worthy of conversation?
I'm not saying that I support lab leak. The observation is that anyone that discussed the lab leak hypothesis on social media had content removed and potentially were banned. I am fundamentally against that.
If the observation more generally is that sentiments should be censored that can risk peoples lives by influencing the decisions they make, then let me ask you this:
Should Charlie Kirk have been censored? If he were, he wouldn't have been assassinated.
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It’s not a bold claim. The Fauci emails showed he and others were discussing this as a reasonable possibility.
> Because that is a bold claim to make. There is no proof of a lab leak and evidence leads to the wet market as the source.
It was not a bold claim at the time. Not only was there no evidence that it was the wet market at the time, the joint probability of a bat coronavirus outbreak where there were few bat caves but where they were doing research on bat coronaviruses is pretty damning. Suppressing discussion of this very reasonable observation was beyond dumb.
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It is not as cut and dry as you think. Also it is rather hard to get any evidence when you aren't allow to visit the "scene of the crime" so to speak and all data is being withheld.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...
Even Dr Fauci said in 2021 he was "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That was a shift from a year earlier, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans.
https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/5/24/22451233/coron...
(..February 2023..) The Department of Energy, which oversees a network of 17 U.S. laboratories, concluded with “low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 most likely arose from a laboratory incident. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it favored the laboratory theory with “moderate” confidence. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from natural zoonotic spillover, while two remain undecided.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081
WHO says that "While most available and accessible published scientific evidence supports hypothesis #1, zoonotic transmission from animals, possibly from bats or an intermediate host to humans, SAGO is not currently able to conclude exactly when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population."
However "Without information to fully assess the nature of the work on coronaviruses in Wuhan laboratories, nor information about the conditions under which this work was done, it is not possible for SAGO to assess whether the first human infection(s) may have resulted due to a research related event or breach in laboratory biosafety."
https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...
WHO paraphrased: We have no data at all about the Wuhan Laboratory so we can not make a conclusion on that hypothesis. Since we have data relating to natural transmission from animals we can say that situation was possible.
But there is no proof of any real wet lab connection and evidence points to the lab as a source.
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The united states also said not to buy masks and that they were ineffective during the pandemic.
Placing absolute trust in these organizations and restricting freedom of speech based on that is a very bootlicking, anti-freedom stance
Fauci was trying to prevent a run on masks, which he believed were needed by the health care workers. So he probably justified his lie to the US to himself because it was for the "greater good" (The ends justify the means is not my view BTW).
It turns out that masks ARE largely ineffective at preventing CoViD infection. It's amazing how many studies have come up with vastly different results.
https://egc.yale.edu/research/largest-study-masks-and-covid-...
(Before you tell me that the story I cited above says the opposite, look at the effectiveness percentages they claim for each case.)
There's also this: https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1970565993169588579
Actual (N95/FFP2/FFP3) masks DO work, your comment is misleading. The study you've linked says:
> Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of charge, accompanied by a range of mask-wearing promotional activities inspired by marketing research
"of various construction" is... not very specific.
If you just try to cover your face with a piece of cloth it won't work well. But if you'll use a good mask (N95/FFP2/FFP3), with proper fit [0] then you can decrease the chance of being infected (see e.g. [1])
[0] https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protectio...
[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/upgrading-ppe-for-staff-...
They claim a 5% reduction in spread with cloth masks and a 12% reduction with surgical masks. I think 1 less case out of every 10 or 20 is pretty acceptable?
Especially at the time when many countries were having their healthcare systems overloaded by cases.
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I didn't want to be the one to have to say it, but neither masks nor social distancing had any scientific backing at all. It was all made up, completely made up. The saddest thing I see all the time is the poor souls STILL wearing masks in 2025 for no reason. I don't care how immunocompromised they are, the mask isn't doing anything to prevent viral infection at all. They might help against pollen. I also can't believe how many doctors and nurses at my wife's cancer clinic wear masks all the damn time even though they are not in a surgical enviornment. It's all been foisted upon them by the management of those clinics and the management is completely insane and nobody speaks up about it because it's their job if they do, so the isanity just keeps rolling on and on and it is utterly dehumanizing and demoralizing. If a cancer patient wants to wear a mask because it affords them some tiny comfort, then fine, but that is purely psychological. I've seen it over and over and over because I've been at numerous hospitals this past year trying to help my wife survive a cancer that I think Pfizer may be to blame for.
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Yeah they burned a lot of trust with that, for sure.
They burned it beyond down to the ground and below. And many of you on here willfully continue to trust them and argue vehemently against people who try to tell you the actual truth of the matter. RFK Jr. is a flawed human being, but he's doing some good work in unwinding some of the web of lies we live under right now.
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I think the problem is that apparently some people discovered there is a profitable business model in spreading misinformation, so a trustful (even if not always right), non malicious, reference of information might be needed.
But who watches the watchmen?
it was an extreme time, but yes, probably the most authoritarian action I've seen social media take.
misinformation is a real and worsening problem, but censorship makes conspiracies flourish, and establishes platforms as arbiters of truth. that "truth" will shift with the political tides.
IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons.
This just seems incredibly difficult. Even between people who are highly intelligent, educated, and consider themselves to be critical thinkers there can be a huge divergence of what "truth" is on many topics. Most people have no tools to evaluate various claims and it's not something you can just "teach kids". Not saying education can't move the needle but the forces we're fighting need a lot more than that.
I think some accountability for platforms is an important part of this. Platforms right now have the wrong incentives, we need to fix this. It's not just about "truth" but it's also about stealing our attention and time. It's a drug and we should regulate it like the drug it is.
As I recall from my school days, in Social Studies class there were a set of "Critical Thinking" questions at the end of every chapter in the textbook. Never once were we assigned any of those questions.
I'd expect questions with that label to have the sort of answers that are a pain to grade.
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Some of the worst examples of viral misinformation I've encountered were image posts on social media. They'll often include a graph, a bit of text and links to dense articles from medical journals. Most people will give up at that point and assume that it's legit because the citations point to BMJ et el. You actually need to type those URLs into a browser by hand, and assuming they go anywhere leverage knowledge taught while studying university level stats.
I spent several hours on one of these only to discover the author of the post had found a subtle way to misrepresent the findings and had done things to the graph to skew it further. You cannot expect a kid (let alone most adults) to come to the same conclusion through lessons on critical thinking.
> "IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons."
You just described a perfectly normal "Civics & Current Events" class in early grade-school back when / where I grew up. We were also taught how to "follow the facts back to the actual sources" and other such proper research skills. This was way back when you had to go to an actual library and look up archived newspapers on microfiche, and encyclopedias were large collections of paper books. Y'know... When dinosaurs still roamed the streets... ;)
> IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school.
This is extremely difficult. Many of the people who thrive on disinformation are drawn to it because they are contrarian. They distrust anything from the establishment and automatically trust anything that appears anti-establishment. If you tell them not to trust certain sources that’s actually a cue to them to explore those sources more and assume they’re holding some valuable information that “they” don’t want you to know.
The dynamics of this are very strange. A cluster of younger guys I know can list a dozen different times medical guidance was wrong in history from memory (Thalidomide, etc), but when you fact check Joe Rogan they laugh at you because he’s a comedian so you can’t expect him to be right about everything. “Do your own research” is the key phrase, which is a dog whistle to mean find some info to discount the professionals but then take sources like Joe Rogan and his guests at face value because they’re not the establishment.