Trump’s May 19th
Kiss-Off Letter to WHO Lied (As Usual)
Eric Zuesse
On May 19th, Donald Trump
presented to the World Health Organization (the U.N.’s health-organization),
in a brief letter
that included no sources but only allegations, essentially a promise that
after 30 days he will “make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the
World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the
organization” (unless the WHO will “demonstrate independence from China” by,
basically, blaming China for Covid-19, which is not likely to happen).
His very first allegation
was: “The World Health Organization 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’s website enables (not
conveniently but it does) chronological access to all of its articles on this
coronavirus, and all of the first three were first published online, actually,
on January 24th, and none of them is anything like the current
American Liar-in-Chief’s description (condemnatory of China) asserts. Two of
the three January 24th coronavirus articles were among the earliest scientific
reports of what was, as of that date, scientifically established to be true
specifically about this virus and its origin and its disease, and the third
article was a summary of the other two and a then-current-state-of-the-art
report about those two articles and all else that was scientifically known
about these matters, as of January 24th. Here are highlights from that
comprehensive article, to be compared with Trump’s opening statement, that “The
World Health Organization consistently ignored credible reports of the virus
spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports
from the Lancet medical journal”:
—
Data sharing and outbreaks:
best practice exemplified
David L Heymann,
Published:January 24, 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30184-7
At the beginning of an
outbreak such as this, readily available information is important to begin the
assessment necessary to understand the risks and begin outbreak containment
activities. This information includes initial reports from the outbreak site
and from laboratories supporting the initial investigation, and information
obtained from previous outbreaks with similar organisms. …
The two Articles that have
been published in The Lancet [BOTH LIKEWISE ON JAN 24] provide some of this
information: the study by Jasper Fuk-Woo Chan and colleagues1 of a family
cluster of six people who returned to their homes in Shenzhen, Guangdong
province, a coastal area of south China bordering Hong Kong, with infection
after having travelled to Wuhan, Hubei province, China; and the study by
Chaolin Huang and colleagues2 of 41 people confirmed to have infection and
admitted to hospital in Wuhan, where the outbreak is thought to have begun.
These early but important Articles include contact information and estimates of
incubation periods, the ages of those who are infected and their clinical
manifestations, laboratory and radiological information, and information about
the contacts that led to their infection.
The picture these two
manuscripts paint is of a disease with a 3–6 day incubation period and insidious
onset with fever, cough, and myalgia—with or without diarrhoea or shortness of
breath, or both. Laboratory findings include leucopenia, and radiological
findings of bilateral ground-glass opacities.1, 2 Some patients have mild
disease, but older patients (aged >60 years) progress to severe acute
respiratory distress syndrome, and a need for intubation and intensive care.
And some infections terminate in death, but a case-fatality rate cannot be
determined.
These Articles also confirm
that many patients had contact with the market that is the suspected point
source of infection,2 while others did not but did have had contact with
patients in their family cluster or elsewhere.1 Although these reports confirm
person-to-person transmission, the means of transmission and the
transmissibility cannot be hypothesised from the information published. …
The information in these
Articles are pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that are being fit together by WHO as
it continues to collect official reports and informal information from its
virtual groups of national clinicians, epidemiologists, and virologists working
at outbreak sites and brought together from around the world. When pieced
together, these emerging data will permit regular refinement of the risk
assessment, and real-time guidance to countries for patient management and
outbreak control, including the best case definition for use in surveillance
around outbreak sites and elsewhere.
Early official information
from the Chinese Government about the outbreak in Wuhan suggested that the
source of the outbreak was being confirmed, that patients were being isolated,
that tracing of contacts of known patients were being identified and observed
for fever, and that no health workers had been infected.3 The cause of the outbreak
was rapidly identified by genetic sequencing as a novel coronavirus. Risk
assessment at that time was guarded but suggested that the outbreak was more
like that caused by the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus
than the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus.
However, this information
was from what now appears to be first-generation cases from a point source, but
at the time it seems that a second generation, and perhaps a third generation,
of cases was already reported in the incubation period, and this generation
appears to have included health workers.
Health worker infections are
an ominous finding in any emerging infection. Front-line health workers can be
initially at risk and infected when they examine and treat patients who present
with a respiratory infection; if handwashing or other infection prevention and
control measures are not in place, these health workers are at great risk of
infection and become the inadvertent carriers to patients who are in hospital
for other diseases and treatments, family members, and the community.
Early in the SARS
coronavirus outbreak, frontline health workers became infected, which amplified
transmission to patients in hospitals where outbreaks were occurring.4 Early
evidence from the initial MERS outbreaks suggested that health workers were
likewise being infected, but that their infections were less severe than those
of patients in hospitals who became infected and had comorbidities such as
diabetes or chronic respiratory disease.5
Today, the epidemiology of
both SARS and MERS viruses is mostly understood, and the same will be true for
the current outbreak of 2019-nCoV if data continue to be freely shared and used
to provide real-time guidance. These Articles and others being rapidly
disseminated and shared will have a major role in assuring that this global
collaboration occurs. …
—
That opening allegation is
typical of the others in America’s current Liar-in-Chief’s insulting letter to
WHO about China and about WHO.
————
Investigative
historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not
Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event
that Created Christianity.
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