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The World Health Organization (WHO) quietly updated a timeline this week to reflect that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) never reported its discovery of the coronavirus to the WHO and that the global health agency had to learn about it by itself, despite the WHO’s praise of Chinese transparency.
An old WHO timeline of the virus, published on its website, stated:
31 Dec 2019
Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province. A novel coronavirus was eventually identified.
A note on the old timeline now states, “This statement is no longer maintained. An updated version was published on 29 June 2020.”
The updated WHO timeline reflects that WHO’s own office in China found open-source reports on the coronavirus and alerted the WHO’s Western Pacific Regional Office, and on January 1, WHO requested information from Chinese authorities. It states (emphasis added):
31 Dec 2019
WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China.The Country Office notified the International Health Regulations (IHR) focal point in the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office about the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission media statement of the cases and provided a translation of it.WHO’s Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) platform also picked up a media report on ProMED (a programme of the International Society for Infectious Diseases) about the same cluster of cases of “pneumonia of unknown cause”, in Wuhan.Several health authorities from around the world contacted WHO seeking additional information.
1 January 2020
WHO requested information on the reported cluster of atypical pneumonia cases in Wuhan from the Chinese authorities.WHO activated its Incident Management Support Team (IMST), as part of its emergency response framework, which ensures coordination of activities and response across the three levels of WHO (Headquarters, Regional, Country) for public health emergencies.
The update came after Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) released an interim report on its investigation of China’s response after it discovered cases of the coronavirus in Wuhan.
The Republican investigation discovered that China never notified WHO about the coronavirus outbreak.
The investigation discovered that on December 31, 2019, Chinese media reports of the virus began to appear online, including on the U.S.-based platform for early intelligence about infectious disease outbreaks. The WHO’s executive director, Dr. Michael Ryan, admitted he found out about the coronavirus outbreak on the platform.
Instead of being transparent, the CCP began to cover up the outbreak by censoring references to the virus on the Internet and in messaging platforms.
The WHO’s update is significant because most western mainstream media news outlets have reported that China told the WHO about the outbreak, as implied by the WHO in its earlier timeline. The WHO never corrected those media reports.
Meanwhile, China has also quietly dropped its claims that it told the WHO about the virus.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian admitted on June 24, 2020, during a press conference, “On January 3, China started to send regular updates to the WHO as well as other countries and regions, including the US.”
HFAC Lead Republican and China Task Force chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said in a statement:
I’m glad to see the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party have both read my interim report on the origins of the pandemic and are finally admitting to the world the truth – the CCP never reported the virus outbreak to the WHO in violation of WHO regulations. The question now is whether the CCP will continue their false propaganda campaign that continues to claim they warned the world, or whether they will come clean and begin to work with the world health community to get to the bottom of this deadly pandemic.
HFAC Republicans are continuing their investigation into China and the WHO’s handling of the virus, and plan to issue a full report later this year.
Democrats — who are trying to focus blame on President Trump for the coronavirus during an election year — did not take part in the investigation in fear this would deflect blame away from Trump.
From 10 years ago
The World Health Organization has suddenly gone from crying "The sky is falling!" like a cackling Chicken Little to squealing like a stuck pig. The reason: charges that the agency deliberately fomented swine flu hysteria. "The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible," the agency claims on its Web site. A WHO spokesman declined to specify who or what gave this "description," but the primary accuser is hard to ignore.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO's motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the "false pandemic" is "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century."
Even within the agency, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology in Munster, Germany, Dr. Ulrich Kiel, has essentially labeled the pandemic a hoax. "We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources [$18 billion so far] in terms of public health," he said.
They're right. This wasn't merely overcautiousness or simple misjudgment. The pandemic declaration and all the Klaxon-ringing since reflect sheer dishonesty motivated not by medical concerns but political ones.
Unquestionably, swine flu has proved to be vastly milder than ordinary seasonal flu. It kills at a third to a tenth the rate, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Data from other countries like France and Japan indicate it's far tamer than that.
Indeed, judging by what we've seen in New Zealand and Australia (where the epidemics have ended), and by what we're seeing elsewhere in the world, we'll have considerably fewer flu deaths this season than normal. That's because swine flu muscles aside seasonal flu, acting as a sort of inoculation against the far deadlier strain.
Did the WHO have any indicators of this mildness when it declared the pandemic in June?
Absolutely, as I wrote at the time. We were then fully 11 weeks into the outbreak and swine flu had only killed 144 people worldwide--the same number who die of seasonal flu worldwide every few hours. (An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 per year by the WHO's own numbers.) The mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people.
But how could the organization declare a pandemic when its own official definition required "simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness." Severity--that is, the number of deaths--is crucial, because every year flu causes "a global spread of disease."
Easy. In May, in what it admitted was a direct response to the outbreak of swine flu the month before, WHO promulgated a new definition matched to swine flu that simply eliminated severity as a factor. You could now have a pandemic with zero deaths.
Under fire, the organization is boldly lying about the change, to which anybody with an Internet connection can attest. In a mid-January virtual conference WHO swine flu chief Keiji Fukuda stated: "Did WHO change its definition of a pandemic? The answer is no: WHO did not change its definition." Two weeks later at a PACE conference he insisted: "Having severe deaths has never been part of the WHO definition."
They did it; but why?
In part, it was CYA for the WHO. The agency was losing credibility over the refusal of avian flu H5N1 to go pandemic and kill as many as 150 million people worldwide, as its "flu czar" had predicted in 2005.
Around the world nations heeded the warnings and spent vast sums developing vaccines and making other preparations. So when swine flu conveniently trotted in, the WHO essentially crossed out "avian," inserted "swine," and WHO Director-General Margaret Chan arrogantly boasted, "The world can now reap the benefits of investments over the last five years in pandemic preparedness."
But there's more than bureaucratic self-interest at work here. Bizarrely enough, the WHO has also exploited its phony pandemic to push a hard left political agenda.
In a September speech WHO Director-General Chan said "ministers of health" should take advantage of the "devastating impact" swine flu will have on poorer nations to get out the message that "changes in the functioning of the global economy" are needed to "distribute wealth on the basis of" values "like community, solidarity, equity and social justice." She further declared it should be used as a weapon against "international policies and systems that govern financial markets, economies, commerce, trade and foreign affairs."
Chan's dream now lies in tatters. All the WHO has done, says PACE's Wodart, is to destroy "much of the credibility that they should have, which is invaluable to us if there's a future scare that might turn out to be a killer on a large scale."
Contact-Tracing Apps Could
Become Permanent Once the
Pandemic Is Over
28 May, 2020
Privacy advocacy groups are concerned contact tracing measures initiated to combat coronavirus outbreaks could be used to track citizens beyond the pandemic.
It comes as apps made to tackle COVID-19 outbreaks become compulsory—and even permanent in some areas.
The Chinese city of Hangzhou plans to make a mandatory app, implemented due to COVID-19 crisis, permanent. Officials said this would create a "firewall to enhance people's health and immunity" following the pandemic.
Meanwhile India has made its contact tracing app, which uses Bluetooth and location data, compulsory for some workers, while it has also been mandatory for passengers on trains in the country.
Nations across the globe have spoken of the need for contact tracing to stem the pandemic, allowing people to be told if they come into contact with an infected individual.
Western nations, including the U.S. and the U.K., have both looked at this strategy, after seeing its use in nations such as China, Singapore and South Korea.
There have even been suggestions the U.S. could require 100,000 workers mobilized to conduct tracing for exposure, in order to assist in stemming a second wave of the outbreak.
Ray Walsh, a digital privacy expert from ProPrivacy, an organization that advocates digital freedom, told Newsweek he is concerned the tactics being implemented in places such as China could spread to other nations.
"We don't want the threat of coronavirus or a future pandemic to threaten privacy," he said.
As contact tracing measures are discussed, Walsh said he hoped it will be made clear when such measures will end.
"It's going to be down to the government to say, society can go back to normal, or say we're going to have to continue tracing to stop it from going back up," he said, adding that he thinks the point at which tracing can stop needs to be firmly set.
If an exit from the use of such surveillance isn't determined, the continued use could have an impact on how people interact with one another, preventing an actual return to societal normality, Walsh said.
"It's led to comparisons to shows like Black Mirror. It may affect your social standing," Walsh said.
"It's easy to see how that could affect the fabric of society as we know it."
The continued use of such apps would diminish the prospect of moving around in future without the prospect of the government knowing your whereabouts and even the company you kept, which could in turn impact how people choose to conduct themselves and who they associate with, Walsh said.
At present such apps in most countries look set to be voluntary, however potential pressures, such as countries potentially requiring their use to allow travel to them, might make using them unavoidable for some, he added.
Gus Hosein, executive director at Privacy International, said he would be concerned as to what would happen to such apps when the pandemic or national outbreaks are deemed to be over.
"It's always been my concern when it comes to these apps, it's not that they're necessarily a bad idea, but what happens at the end of the pandemic?
"It's definitely a concern," he told Newsweek.
Hosein said that for the apps to be downloaded in high volume, those behind them "have to make the case that they are worthy of our trust."
On the potential for future use of the apps, Hosein said: "They have to make sure the purpose is clear and never altered."
If the purposes are not clear and the uses reach further, this could be a "potential nightmare" around movements been monitored, adding incremental developments of the use could be an issue. This could see the apps outlined as first being to respond to this pandemic, then switch to preparing for another, then go into wider health research.
In Hosein's opinion, the data collection should cease once the World Health Organization (WHO) declares the pandemic over—at which point he said the information gathered should be deleted too.
Omer Tene, chief knowledge officer at the International Association of Privacy Professionals, spoke of the possibility of function creep, where the use of a technology expands beyond its original purpose.
"Function creep is a well-known phenomenon when dealing with new technologies and institutions. For example, the surveillance infrastructure set up post 9/11 lingered for many years after the crisis was over and in some respects is still with us today," he told Newsweek.
He said that tracing apps should be built with privacy in mind from the outset, adding: "We need laws and regulations, such as the bills currently considered these days in Congress from both sides of the aisle, which would impose policy restrictions on these practices after the COVID-19 situation abates."
Tene said that while, if apps are optional, people can just turn them off, there should be legislation that requires all data collection to stop "once the public health emergency ends."
The U.S. does not have plans for a nationwide app, with states to make such decisions of their own accord. Alabama, North Dakota and South Carolina, for example, have said they will create apps using tech from Apple and Google to help conduct tracing. These systems, called an application programming interface, from Google and Apple will only be able to be used for COVID-19 response.
President Donald Trump previously addressed some concerns over tracing technology, stating people had "constitutional problems" with its use.
Tracing has been deemed essential by many experts in stopping a future mass spread of the virus, with the Centers for Disease Control describing it as "a key strategy for preventing further spread of COVID-19."
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said "countries must isolate, test, treat and trace" in order to control the pandemic.
He said in March: "Isolating, testing and treating every suspected case, and tracing every contact, must be the backbone of the response in every country."
These comments make it appear many people across the globe will see contact tracing ramped up, though the parameters of the sort of measures some might face remain unclear, with this left up to individual areas to determine.
Coronavirus case figures continue to rise across the globe, with more than 5.7 million worldwide since the start of the outbreak, according to Johns Hopkins University figures.
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