The article quoted below provides more evidence that the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) failed to protect world health during the Covid pandemic. Its funding and decision-making processes made failure highly likely.
In the absence of W.H.O, how can we learn quickly of potential pandemic threats from around the world? The Covid book co-authored by Ridley documents quick and effective Twitter (now X) networks that spread and evaluated Covid information. Maybe a proof of concept?
(p. D3) In early February 2020, China locked down more than 50 million people, hoping to hinder the spread of a new coronavirus. No one knew at the time exactly how it was spreading, but Lidia Morawska, an expert on air quality at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, did not like the clues she managed to find.
It looked to her as if the coronavirus was spreading through the air, ferried by wafting droplets exhaled by the infected. If that were true, then standard measures such as disinfecting surfaces and staying a few feet away from people with symptoms would not be enough to avoid infection.
Dr. Morawska and her colleague, Junji Cao at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, drafted a dire warning. Ignoring the airborne spread of the virus, they wrote, would lead to many more infections. But when the scientists sent their commentary to medical journals, they were rejected over and over again.
“No one would listen,” Dr. Morawska said.
It took more than two years for the World Health Organization to officially acknowledge that Covid spread through the air.
For the full story see:
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 3, 2025, and has the title “Could the Bird Flu Become Airborne?”)
The book co-authored by Ridley that I praise in my initial comments is:
Chan, Alina, and Matt Ridley. Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. New York: Harper, 2021.