That isn't all the WHO team has done. They've also just lent their support to the theory China's been pushing that Covid-19 didn't originate in China at all and was brought into the country on frozen food. This is even more implausible than the lab escape theory for a variety of reasons (formites don't seem to be a major source of Covid-19 transmission, the detections on frozen food all appear to have been caused by outbreaks at the facilities where it was detected rather than vice-versa, and there'd be a lot more places than China seeing their hospitals overwhelmed early on in the pandemic if it had originated elsewhere). The reason China is pushing it is entirely political - it allows them to move the blame from their own governments' screw-ups onto foreigners. I think this may have happened after the linked article was written though.

The WHO's previous Covid-19 mission to China also resulted them in regurgitating a bunch of Chinese government claims - the one that stood out to me was the claim, based on what appeared to be an utterly nonsensical argument from evidence indicating the exact opposite, that China had detected basically all the Covid-19 infections in Wuhan and therefore there were no undetected or asmyptomatic cases. Current estimates from Chinese scientists are that maybe 1 in 10 cases were actually detected. This misinformation hugely fucked with everyone else's response to Covid-19. They also lent their backing to the Chinese government's story about how they'd "beaten" Covid-19, which was really obviously designed as propaganda for domestic consumption and wasn't remotely plausible as a method of stopping it.

I think the way Mugshots.com screwed up is that the site owners posted the information to the website themselves. Section 230 only protects the site owner from being treated as the author of posts and all the legal consequences that come with that if they did not, in fact, author the posts. The successful sites are the ones which got this right.

That doesn't help when Carol's forum (or in this case sites like Ripoff Report) don't allow the original poster to remove things. If they won't remove the defamatory stuff posted by Bob, then suing him does nothing to end the harm caused by it, and Section 230 makes it impossible to get an injunction to force the sites to remove it. Naturally, the websites with business models revolving around charging to remove defamatory content understand this and don't allow the original posters to remove it, leaving the victims with no option except to pay up.

Yes it has, and the only surprising thing is that it's taken so long for the mainstream press to notice. One of the consequences of Section 230 as interpreted by the US courts is that it's impossible to get content removed from sites like Ripoff Report except by paying them money, no matter how defamatory and false - they won't remove it otherwise and Section 230 makes it impossible to get any kind of court injunction forcing them to do so. An entire industry of sites has sprung up that takes advantage of this by hosting reputation and career-destroying smears against people and businesses, getting them ranked highly in Google results, and then charging the victims money to remove them. I know Ripoff Report in particular brags about the fact that everyone who tried to get defamatory content removed through the courts rather than by paying them failed.

A few weeks? More like his entire term in office until he was replaced by Biden. Remember, amongst other things Biden campaigned on the (utterly false) claim that Trump's existing, more targetted travel restrictions actually made things worse. All the existing evidence seems to be that they spared the US for at least a month until it got screwed over by the fact that Covid had gotten out of control in Europe completely undetected. Somehow, I don't think the public or media perception would be improved by Trump closing off travel from countries which were reporting no cases, especially given the narrative that he was relying on travel bans because he was an evil right-winger who wanted to close off borders even though it wouldn't work.

There's only one country I actually know of that's doing widespread random surveillance testing: the UK. (Presumably some of the smaller countries are as well, but it just doesn't seem to be commonplace.) Despite this and unusually widespread testing for people with possible symptoms, there's still a perception that we're failing at testing compared to the rest of the world, probably for the same reason there's a perception the US is: a large chunk of the press absolutely hates our leader for reasons totally unrelated to Covid.

This isn't the result of the UK or London being stuck in the past compared to Europe though. These are (as far as anyone can tell) current EU standards for policing-related data exchange between EU members which were copy and pasted into the Brexit deal in order to give us continued access to that exchange of data. That is to say, the European Union has been mandating the use of insecure encryption technologies for years and the BBC is spinning this to instead support the mainstream narrative that the UK screwed up, Brexit is a disaster, and we should just have remained in the EU rather than letting our incompetent government do things like this.

In order to find Covid cases, you need to test people for Covid, and America has a lot more than 4% of the total Covid testing. Most of Africa in particular is a bit of a black hole in terms of testing and there are a lot of people living there, but even Europe has been kind of lacking outside of the UK and a few other, mostly smaller, countries.

Not just by Russians on Twitter. As I recall, the mainstream media used security vulnerabilities in voting machines that were no longer in use to undermine confidence in the 2016 election results. This is all so transparent it's unbelievable, especially given that prior to Trump winning the election voting machine security was last portrayed as a major issue back when Bush won.

Including - ironically enough - viral claims of voter suppression and election rigging to elect Trump that spread on social media despite being completely bogus. One of the more popular ones even had a sentence in the article, innocuous enough unless you knew what was wrong with his claims, that made it clear he knew it was bullshit and couldn't work to rig the election as claimed. Basically, he compared the number of people marked to be purged from the electoral roll in key states like Michigan, pointed to the fact that it was larger than Trump's victory margin, and claimed this was proof of vote rigging. The trouble is, those people who were marked for removal were still on the roll and still able to vote, which would cancel their removal altogether - and nestled in the middle of the article was a cryptic note saying that what exactly happened next to people on those purge lists depended on the state, making it obvious that he'd discovered they weren't removed and could still vote and just decided to push ahead with his narrative anyway.

There was a mysterious lack of mainstream media concern about those bogus claims and the role of social media in spreading them, for some odd reason.

If anything, there are diseconomies of scale to testing. There's a limited global manufacturing capacity for everything you'd need to carry out Covid-19 testings, from reagents to swabs to testing machines and the cartridges for them. Wealthier smaller countries can tilt things in their favour by outbidding everyone else and buying up more of that limited supply, but larger companies have no choice but to expand the overall supply - and the more they do this, the less likely it is that manufacturing capacity will ever get used for anything else and the more of the cost they have to eat.

There are probably also scaling issues with the parts where countries contain, eradicate and keep out the virus. Eradication means you need exactly zero infections, and as you approach zero the difficulty of this becomes dominated by rare long-tail events like it escaping quarantine hotels via rubbish bins that probably can't be fully eliminated. The bigger your population, the more of these annoying low-probability high-consequence events ruin your elimination plan.

I think what you're missing is that those testing problems were before Covid really hit the US hard, so they didn't much affect the overall case count. That article from the start of April is basically a retrospective after the problems had been fixed and testing had been ramped up successfully - if I remember rightly, by that point the US Covid testing program was so much bigger than everyone else's that it was one of the ones the BBC was pointing to here in the UK to convince us that our government was failing at testing. New York's cases peaked some time in April (though it's impossible to say when in April the real peak was, due to testing increasing - the peak in deaths suggests probably towards the start), and the outbreaks in the rest of the country were way behind New York.

Last time I checked, the US was doing more testing than almost all other countries, which means that they're going to be even further from the worst in the world than the raw number of cases suggests. This is a particular problem when comparing with European countries which had major outbreaks in the spring, since they did a lot less testing back then than the US did during its outbreak and so will have detected a lot fewer cases - for the most part they rolled out really widespread mass testing later, were hit earlier, and never actually caught up with the level of testing the US had reached when I last looked, all of which make them even worse in comparison with the US than the raw case numbers suggest. This didn't stop trusted, mainstream publications like the New York Times comparing the total case numbers as proof that the US had done far worse (and of course blaming it all on Trump). It's even more of a problem when comparing with developing countries too, of course.

Steroids - in particular dexamethasone - are the only thing that have been definitely shown to reduce Covid-19 death rates in proper, randomized clinical trials. They're cheap too. Vitamin D is probably the treatment with the best evidence after that; not only is there evidence from observational studies, I think someone has demonstrated that injecting patients with vitamin D metabolites directly improves outcomes, and vitamin D deficiency is actually really common in the western world.

Part of the problem is that the American press - especially the New York Times - generally glosses over how bad testing was in Europe back then and how meaningless the case numbers were in order to use the fact the US has reported more total cases to convince their readers it is doing uniquely, spectacularly worse at handling Covid-19 because of Trump. (Also that it has uniquely and spectacularly failed at testing due to Trump, when in reality it's been doing better at that than pretty much everyone else for months and months now.)