Over the weekend the World Health Organization (WHO) had to delete a misleading tweet about the Wuhan virus. As per the usual with fake news media outlets around the world had already spread their misinformation about secondary COVID-19 infections before the misinformation was deleted.
On Friday, the WHO published a paper about “immunity passports” – the idea has been rejected by US lawmakers – the WHO warned against them saying that “no study has evaluated whether the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to subsequent infection by this virus in humans.”
What the WHO tweeted had no context and it only said this, “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from #COVID19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
What they said is technically true but that’s also because the virus has only existed since November.
Reason reported:
That’s technically true: There’s no evidence of immunity. But that’s because COVID-19 is new and the matter hasn’t been conclusively studied yet. Scientists have good reason to expect COVID-19 survivors to have some immunity to the virus, though they’re unsure how strong it will be or how long it will last.
“When they say ‘no evidence’ they mean something like ‘no definitive proof, yet,'” wrote statistician Nate Silver in response to the WHO tweet. “But the average person is going to read it as ‘there’s no immunity to coronavirus,’ which is likely false and not a good summation of the evidence.”
But that didn’t stop the lamestream media. Bloomberg News ran the headline, “WHO Warns You May Catch Coronavirus More Than Once.” Here’s how the article started:
Catching Covid-19 once may not protect you from getting it again, according to the World Health Organization, a finding that could jeopardize efforts to allow people to return to work after recovering from the virus.
The WHO did clarify:
Earlier today we tweeted about a new WHO scientific brief on “immunity passports”. The thread caused some concern & we would like to clarify:
We expect that most people who are infected with #COVID19 will develop an antibody response that will provide some level of protection. pic.twitter.com/AmxvQQLTjM
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) April 25, 2020
However, the WHO has still not deleted their tweet that claimed in January the coronavirus is not contagious to humans.
