[mortify]

When COVID hit, the WHO had a pandemic plan in place (written in 2016). Organizations often do this so that when an emergency happens, they can use the decisions made with cooler heads rather than trying to react to a rapidly changing landscape... at least until new, solid evidence emerges.

The WHO did the opposite of its pandemic plan. They failed to follow best practices and did so without any evidence for it.

The best evidence that the current WHO is not to be trusted... is the old WHO.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

This is an impressively reductionist view.

[jjice]

As someone who knows nothing about either side (and I assume many other readers are in the same boat), can you explain why it's reductionist? Genuinely curious about both sides.

[horsawlarway]

Well - simple thought: You are reading a random comment that has made a claim:

Claim: A plan was in place in 2016 that would have been effective for covid, but was not followed.

But right now they have absolutely zero evidence to back that claim up -

where is the plan?

Who decided it would work in 2019?

Did the plan need to be changed for reasons not foreseen (ex: expected or real supply shortages, unclear statistics/data, dissenting opinion from other groups, etc)

Did the WHO even have the ability to implement this plan? (ex: political meddling is a real thing)

---

Basically - I'll start with question #1: Show me the plan, because googling for a 2016 World health organization pandemic plan comes up essentially blank outside of some general influenza prep that was absolutely not usable for a pandemic of the scale of covid.

If this is so obvious, and this plan was so readily available... I would think a 10 minute google search would turn something up - but I have not found it (not claiming it does not exist - just that the rest of the conversation is fucking pointless without it).

[mortify]

The CDC plan is still available online as a PDF (see below). It was targeted toward influenza as that was the pandemic they anticipated. When Covid hit, due to it being a novel coronavirus, there was no plan in place. There was no data. Until that data was available, it would make sense to follow the existing plan and modify it as new data was collected.

What surprises me is that as we learned that Covid was spread in a way similar to influenza that our plan didn't track more closely to the CDC's pandemic plan. It tracked in very much the opposite direction. It's fine to change direction, but we should understand why.

Link to PDF version of pandemic plan: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit...