The key sentence that Tedros is being criticised for is:
“First, there is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. WHO doesn’t recommend limiting trade and movement.”
However, in the same speech:
“ we must all act together now to limit further spread.
The vast majority of cases outside China have a travel history to Wuhan, or contact with someone with a travel history to Wuhan”
and
“Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it”
This leads me to believe that perhaps he was trying to have it both ways:
- flag the need for action
- keep a major player from “losing face”.
I don’t envy his job, or in fact any of the UN organisations. You’re at the mercy of your big funders; you’re trying to influence hundreds of countries who’d rather focus on their own internal politics; you have no actual power. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. How on earth do you move the needle at all in that kind of environment?
His job is world health. If he put "saving face" for China, or trying to keep his job, over recommending a travel ban to prevent the spread of a deadly virus, then he is incompetent and he failed to prevent deaths... and my point still stands.
Your point only stands if the health ministers of the countries receiving that advice, had no responsibility for the advice they gave their own governments. Or do you believe that nation states bear no responsibility for their own decisions? Remember, WHO has no actual authority to impose anything. National governments do. Look to your own health minister and leaders for where to sheet the blame. Anybody hearing or reading that speech above that didn’t act - especially given all the actual technical guidance being offered by the WHO at the same time - should be looking in the mirror. A point I made elsewhere still stands. From the same source of advice - WHO - multiple nation states took different courses of action. Why do you think that is? They surely can’t all attribute their decisions to WHO otherwise all countries would have acted the same way. Clearly that’s not what’s happened.
The WHO is a source of information. The decisions made based on that information by various countries is completely irrelevant to anything I'm trying to say.
The WHO chose to recommend against travel bans. This was the information they shared with the world. If countries chose to enact such bans anyway - good for them: they knew better than to believe the WHO. The WHO, compared with 4chan, was in January the inferior source of public information about the virus.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...
Nations who handled the crisis the best, imposed travel bans early on and were criticised by the WHO.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china...