By Ralph T. Niemeyer
Social distancing. Travel restrictions. Curfews. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, more than 50% of the world’s population are affected by WHO-recommended measures, the effectiveness of which, according to the WHO report from October 2019, has little to no scientific evidence.
In the “war against the virus”, measures play a key role, which the World Health Organization (WHO) calls non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI). Well-known examples of this are hand hygiene, mask wearing, school closings or exit restrictions.
The collateral damage of these non-pharmaceutical measures includes a global economic crisis that could drive half a billion people into poverty, and the most massive cuts in freedom of expression and assembly in recent decades.
Anyone who suggests that the horse cure could be worse than the viral disease is consistently drowned out or discredited, if not directly silenced, while the newly discovered end purpose justifies all state action, life extension, almost all means.
Nothing then seems more normal than to want to literally “eradicate” everything that seems like epidemic misinformation about the virus to the UN Secretary General in addition to the pandemic corona virus.
The collateral damage of these non-pharmaceutical measures includes a global economic crisis that could drive half a billion people into poverty, as well as the most massive cuts in freedom of expression and assembly in recent decades.
Anyone who suggests that the horse cure could be worse than the viral disease is consistently drowned out or discredited, if not directly silenced, while the newly discovered end purpose justifies all state action, life extension, almost all means.
Nothing then seems more normal than to want to literally “eradicate” everything that seems like epidemic misinformation about the virus to the UN Secretary General in addition to the pandemic corona virus.
The idea that the protection of human life has absolute priority is correspondingly popular, and it can be assumed that it will remain so even when other pathogens come into view. Because the more systematically you compare corona and influenza viruses, the clearer how many lives the flu claims each year. According to the WHO, there are 650,000 flu deaths worldwide every year.
If all of these lives could be saved with the measures that are currently being implemented, what would be in opposition to demanding and maintaining these strong interventions in the fight against the flu?
As different as the views of supporters and opponents of strong measures regarding the basic appropriateness and long-term feasibility of the currently imposed or planned NPI may be, both camps seem to agree that the possibly disproportionate or unsustainable measures are generally effective .
This unspoken basic assumption is contradicted by none other than the WHO, and most recently in a document from autumn 2019, the summary of which the WHO concludes that there is only weak to very weak scientific evidence for the effectiveness of most of the measures currently implemented to let. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at this document below.
Self-contradiction: In 2019, the WHO documents the absence of reliable evidence for the effectiveness of the measures recommended by it in 2020.
Published in October 2019, the WHO document “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza” reads like a catalog of the measures that governments have implemented in the wake of the COVID 19 crisis.
With the aim of making scientifically sound recommendations for the use of various measures in future flu epidemics and pandemics, the WHO examines four different categories of NPI in this document:
Personal protective measures such as hand hygiene, special sneezing and coughing behavior and the use of protective masks.
Environment-related measures such as surface cleaning, the use of UV light or ventilation techniques.
Social distancing measures such as contact tracing, isolation of the sick and quarantine of risk groups, school and workplace closings and the avoidance of large crowds.
Travel-related measures such as travel warnings, screening of air travelers, domestic travel bans and border closures.
With a view to this catalog of measures, the WHO advises in the event of a pandemic (defined here as a global epidemic triggered by a previously unknown influenza virus for which there is still no basic immunity in the human population) the use of all personal protective measures, the isolation of the sick, regardless of the severity and travel warnings.
In the case of moderately severe pandemics, these measures should be supplemented by the use of face masks, school closings and the targeted avoidance of large crowds.
The WHO only recommends job closures and international travel restrictions in the event of extremely severe pandemics.
Accordingly, in its October 2019 report, the WHO admits that there is little or no reliable information on the effectiveness of the remaining interventions such as social distancing, travel restrictions or curfews.
Interestingly, this WHO document is not the only document that comes to this conclusion. In 2009 the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control’s (ECDC) published its “Guide to Public Health Measures to Reduce the Impact of Influenza Pandemics in Europe”, which contains very similar tables for a very similar set of measures (p. 3ff) and also reports of minor or unproven effects of, in particular, social distancing measures and travel restrictions.
As in the case of the WHO, the extremely scant facts did not prevent the ECDC from recommending precisely those measures for whose effectiveness no scientific evidence could previously be found.
