Inventing a pandemic
The WHO now says it did not endorse lockdowns. The record suggests otherwise — and points to a deeper pattern in how pandemics are framed.
As the United States completes its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), the agency has begun telling a carefully edited version of its role in the Covid-19 pandemic.
The WHO now says it did not endorse lockdowns, insisting that national governments acted independently of its guidance.
But the public record suggests a different picture.
In the earliest and most consequential weeks of 2020, senior WHO officials publicly praised China’s unprecedented shutdown of Wuhan and other cities, describing the response as “bold,” “agile,” and “aggressive.”
Following a joint press conference with Chinese authorities, the WHO credited China’s sweeping actions — including city closures, travel bans and population-wide restrictions — with saving lives and “flattening the curve.”
The WHO’s director-general echoed these assessments, repeatedly applauding China for “setting a new standard” in responding to the outbreak.
In October 2020, it tweeted that sometimes lockdowns were “needed to swiftly suppress the virus and avoid health systems being overwhelmed”.
These were not neutral observations. They were value judgements, delivered by the world’s most influential public health authority at a moment of global panic.
The signal to governments was clear: this was what responsible pandemic control looked like.
Lockdowns were rapidly adopted in over 100 countries by March 2020.
The WHO’s advice may not have been legally binding, but it did legitimise a policy previously considered unethical and disproportionate in democratic societies.
Now, as the human, economic, and social costs of those policies become clear, the WHO is distancing itself from the very measures it once publicly praised.
Is it trying to rewrite history?
A group of German researchers say this is not new. More than a decade earlier, they accused the WHO of “inventing” a pandemic during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.