Comment Re:The mission has failed (Score 1, Troll) 131
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.