I think this was a stupid move, but I’m struggling to think of anything useful WHO has done in the past few months. I’m happy to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t see them distributing supplies where they’re needed or even tabulating numbers. https://twitter.com/stephenmcdonell/status/1250361676937003008

Think about what it means that you can find higher geographic resolution COVID19 case data on our little http://Outbreak.Asia  website than you will at WHO’s website. @OurWorldInData is where you go to see how well different countries are doing w/ testin.

The “WHO test” Americans talk about? Public domain PCR test kit methodologies. HKU was one of the first. WHO just provided a list of links. I’ve seen scattered reports of WHO donating some tests to places like Iran, but that’s about it.

Nor, as far as I am aware, are any doctors anywhere opening the WHO website to learn best practices being learned on the frontlines across the world in how to treat this beastly wrapper of deadly RNA.

One of the earliest red flags that there’s an undetected community outbreak, and a way to gauge how large it is, is when Y country detects imports from X country. Know how we find that data for our Situation Reports? Twitter searches.

https://twitter.com/comparativist/status/1250040709328990209?s=21 https://twitter.com/comparativist/status/1250040709328990209

WHO could also just ask @ICAO for January through March international traffic data to get a sense of which countries are most at risk. They haven’t done it. So editing our Laos + Cambodia SitRep, we have no clue how many US/UK/EU tourists were in SE Asia and when they arrived.

It seems most hospitals went into this crisis with 3-6 months of PPE gear and N95 mask emergency stockpiles. They all burned through them in about a week when cases surged b/c they were changing them out between patients... until they ran out. WHO could have warned about this.

The TL;DR critique is that Gates is describing the Platonic ideal of what you think WHO’s role during a pandemic is. Except it’s not that. Cutting funds like this is dumb, reform should be pushed instead, but who exactly is relying on WHO for anything?
https://twitter.com/billgates/status/1250292126643941376?s=21 https://twitter.com/billgates/status/1250292126643941376

Like I said: happy to be proven wrong https://twitter.com/goldencaskcap/status/1250383443956924418?s=21 https://twitter.com/goldencaskcap/status/1250383443956924418