In this thread, I will show that WHO has been promoting sketchy Chinese data without question since the pandemic started while ignoring human rights abuses.

(I'm not picking on China - my own country is hardly a bastion of freedom - but without Chinese data there's not a shred of evidence that the pandemic originated in China)

I will show that the Chinese Pneumonia of Unknown Etiology (PUE) passive surveillance system is unreliable and that WHO failed to show evidence of an unusual rise in influenza-like-illness in adults in Wuhan during the initial outbreak.

I will show that public health authorities implemented the lockdowns and healthcare slowdowns based on case studies, before a measure of association between the virus and disease was produced.

I will show that once the lockdowns and healthcare slowdowns were implemented, the virus became associated with a multitude of confounding variables that would be expected to increase mortality and morbidity even if the virus isn't unusually virulent, making all subsequent research showing an association between the virus and disease impossible to interpret.

These confounding variables include but aren't limited to: healthcare worker absenteeism, canceled and delayed medical appointments, avoidance of in-person health care due to fear of infection, isolation and quarantine, and reductions in in emergency department utilization during the spring 2020 wave.

Wu, F., Zhao, S., Yu, B. et al. A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in China. Nature 579, 265–269 (2020). Reporting Summary
doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-200

WHO-convened Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2:China Part
who.int/publications/i/item/wh
Annex E1 - ILI surveillance supplementary data

Bovbjerg ML. Foundations of Epidemiology. Oregon State University; 2020. open.oregonstate.education/epi

ourworldindata.org/grapher/exc

@covid19
@auscovid19
@bioinformatics

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“From February 29 through May 29, 2016, we conducted active surveillance in two hospitals and found that 13% of all patients admitted with ARI met the PUE case definition.

None of the respiratory specimens tested were positive for avian influenza.

Only one PUE case was reported to the local CDC; however, it was not reported to the national system because the specimen tested negative for avian influenza virus.

Our findings raise questions about the feasibility of using the existing PUE case definition to identify respiratory infections of public health significance.

Extrapolating our results, if clinicians reported all illnesses meeting the PUE case definition from China’s more than 20,000 hospitals, the number of PUE cases identified would be in the hundreds of thousands per year.

Such numbers would overwhelm the public health system’s capacity for laboratory testing and epidemiologic investigations.”

Xiang, N., Song, Y., Wang, Y. et al. Lessons from an active surveillance pilot to assess the pneumonia of unknown etiology surveillance system in China, 2016: the need to increase clinician participation in the detection and reporting of emerging respiratory infectious diseases. BMC Infect Dis 19, 770 (2019).

doi.org/10.1186/s12879-019-434

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