Fake news from officials on COVID-19 endangers us all
Fake news spread by crackpots and conspiracy theorists on social media is bad enough. When it’s spread by legitimate experts and officials, however, it’s particularly dangerous.
An Associated Press investigation revealed last week that throughout January, the World Health Organization was publicly praising China’s communist government for what it described as its “speedy response” to blowing the whistle on the dangers of the novel coronavirus, while in private it expressed frustration at its secrecy and hesitancy at sharing vital, life-saving information.
By lauding China publicly, the WHO gave the world and its citizens the impression that China was being transparent about this new virus and, as a result, gave everyone a false sense of safety and security. It’s unconscionable.
Tellingly, the countries and regions that have fared the best in their battle against the virus — including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Japan — are the ones whose citizens and governments know, through their proximity and constant dealings with China’s leadership, to distrust official information coming out of the totalitarian government.
Taiwan, for instance — an independent democracy that China claims belongs to it — has had only seven COVID-19 deaths in a population of 23.8 million people, or a rate of 0.3 deaths per million. By contrast, Canada, with a population of 37.7 million has had 7,996 deaths or 212 deaths per million people.
According to the AP, between the day the full genome of COVID-19 was first decoded by a government lab on Jan. 2 and the day the WHO declared a global emergency on Jan. 30, the outbreak spread by a factor of 100 to 200 times, according to retrospective infection data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The virus has now infected more than 7.5 million people worldwide and killed more than 421,000 people, while causing untold damage to the world economy.
“It’s obvious that we could have saved more lives and avoided many, many deaths if China and the WHO had acted faster,” Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, told AP. Sadly, the WHO seemed to be more concerned with appeasing China’s thin-skinned despots.
According to a Feb. 15 report in The Lancet, the date of the first Chinese patient’s symptom onset was Dec. 1. Five days later, that patient’s wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the wet market in Wuhan, where COVID-19 originated, “also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.”
Authorities in China knew there was human-to-human transmission on Dec. 6. but it was weeks before it admitted that fact.
On Jan. 29, Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam — who is a member of the WHO and would have had access to all of the information available on the virus — publicly praised China for its response to COVID-19, even though she knew the government was withholding important information.
Again, this gave Canadians a false sense of security.
For months, Tam and other public health officials rejected the idea of closing Canada’s borders to non-residents. Federal Liberal government officials shamefully insinuated that such a call was xenophobic and racist. Then, days later, they reversed their decision and announced that non-residents would no longer be welcomed to Canada and the whole economy had to shut down.
Then there was the flip-flopping by Tam on the efficacy of masks.
On Monday, Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’S technical lead for coronavirus response, said the spread of COVID-19 by someone who is not showing symptoms appears to be rare.
One day later, the WHO walked back that announcement.
Even here in Alberta, absurd information from local health officials has been disseminated.
On May 22, doctors at Alberta Health Services announced that people shouldn’t leave hand sanitizer in their cars for too long because it could catch fire.
The advice came in a daily COVID-19 newsletter by AHS president Dr. Verna Yiu and senior medical health officer Dr. Laura Mcdougall, and spread around the world.
In a province chock-a-block with chemical and petroleum engineers you’d think they might have checked their facts. Here’s a note from a friend who sells industrial chemicals for a living.
“I heard it reported by AHS doctors that hand sanitizers will catch fire in the car if left there. Ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are the active ingredients, which auto ignite at 689F and 750F respectively. Are we REALLY taking advice from AHS?” he rhetorically asked.
“However, the alcohol could evaporate, making it ineffective, so it shouldn’t be left in a hot vehicle but not because it would catch fire,” he added.
Worse yet, however, is Alberta’s public health officers allowed people who worked at meat-packing plants to work side-by-side for eight hours a day without any personal protective equipment for months, and then tried to blame the rapid spread of infection on those same workers carpooling. At Cargill, in High River, almost half of its 2,000 employees caught the virus, leading to the deaths of four people. It’s an epic and deadly failure on the part of our public health officials and a bona fide scandal.
Then there’s U.S. President Donald Trump, who said ingesting disinfectant might be a legitimate idea worth investigating, something that has been widely mocked.
The head of the WHO — Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — has promised an independent evaluation of the organization’s COVID-19 response.
Here’s hoping we get the real facts from that. In the meantime, as economies start reopening, a healthy dose of skepticism erring on the side of caution is probably your best bet.