> It was not hindsight. Those expats were interviewed ("locked in Wuhan") and broke the "official" timeline.

Do you have anything concrete on that? Because right now I'm drawing a blank what you are even trying to allude to.

But for additional context I should point out that in November 2019 China also recorded an outbreak of the pneumonic plague [0], something that gets conflated a lot with the COVID-19 narrative.

> I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.

How is it different when you are pretty much exactly pushing the Fox narrative there? You stipulate that China knew about H2H in January and allegedly had it well established but didn't share it with the rest of the world, where is your actual evidence for that?

Sounds a lot like that whole Taiwan e-mail to WHO mess where Taiwan claimed to have warned the WHO about H2H, when the actual e-mail didn't say anything like that.

> But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!

"Ringing bells" is not the same as having solid and established H2H vectors. Which, as I mentioned before, is not something that's binary. Something isn't just "H2H or not", there are different vectors and different gradients, establishing them is not easy, that's why even one year after the fact we still struggle to fully map out transmission routes and vectors.

You can't hand-wave such a complicated problem away when it persists to this day.

> No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H.

This is 100% the Fox news interpretation. The WHO tweet was about that one particular Chinese investigation, all it said how that particular investigation didn't yield evidence.

Which is not the same as saying "there is no H2H", interpreting it like that is misinterpreting very concise language on purpose while ignoring literally every other release from the WHO at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO interim guidance for laboratory testing of human suspect cases of NCoV infection from 10 January 2020 [1].

Read trough them and you will realize that the WHO was and is very vocal about respiratory transmission and how to best prevent it. That's only one out of the many WHO releases at the time that warn about the very real, but yet having to be established with actual evidence, H2H nature of the virus.

> Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.

This is once again completely wrong, WHO messaging was to prioritize masks for at risk groups and HCWs due to the massive mask shortages at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO's interim guidance on use of masks from 29 January 2020 [2]

It's astounding that over one year after the fact this kind of misinformation is still circulated, out of all the places here on HN.

The reality is that the WHO was a bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would. Which back then resulted in wide-spread criticism of the WHO for allegedly being "alarmist" when the multi-million death toll didn't actually materialize.

Trying to turn this into "WHO in pocket of China!" is just trying to tie this whole narrative into the current US foreign policy context of antagonizing China. That's also why US officials were among the first [3] to globally spread conspiracy theories about this being an engineered Chinese bio-weapon escaped from a lab.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/18/china-records-...

[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/330374/WHO-...

[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/documents/advice-on-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...