Donald Trump overstates WHO position on coronavirus lockdowns

This week, President Donald Trump exaggerated a position taken by the World Health Organization, saying that the agency had vindicated his derision of lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The World Health Organization just admitted that I was right,” the president tweeted. “Lockdowns are killing countries all over the world. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”

Trump’s message was rapidly shared by thousands online, including commentator Lou Dobbs and Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., who echoed the president’s rallying cry to “open up” and described the closings as “pseudoscientific” and “tyrannical.”

Since the early days of the pandemic, the president has dismissed lockdowns as unnecessary and harmful, even while the virus continued to blaze across the nation.

Trump did not say which WHO statement he was referring to. But one of the few published recent comments from a WHO official about lockdowns came from David Nabarro, one of several envoys from the organization on Covid-19.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said earlier this month to British magazine The Spectator. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted. But by and large, we’d rather not do it.

“We really do appeal to all world leaders, stop using lockdown as your primary method of control,” Nabarro said.

Nabarro described several potential tolls of widespread lockdowns, which have set off economic declines and higher unemployment rates and have widened disparities in many parts of the world, including the United States.

Nabarro has also noted that lockdowns may be necessary under some circumstances. In addition, he has advocated for a multifaceted approach to curbing the spread of the coronavirus — a strategy he recently outlined in a written reflection that highlighted the importance of physical distancing, mask-wearing, accessible testing and contact tracing, among other measures, to pinpoint and suppress outbreaks.

In a statement, Hedinn Halldorsson, a spokesman for the WHO, reaffirmed that the pandemic needed to be addressed with such a “package” of protective tactics.

“WHO has never advocated for national lockdowns as a primary means for controlling the virus,” he said. “Dr. Nabarro was repeating our advice to governments to ‘do it all.’ ”

Some countries, like New Zealand, used lockdowns to great success to tame their outbreaks. Others, like South Korea, were able to circumvent them by pushing hard on testing. All success stories, however, have one thing in common: swift action to acknowledge and beat back the virus.

Lockdowns are extreme and inevitably come with costs, said Syra Madad, a public health expert and epidemiologist based in New York. But they can afford communities much-needed time to ready other methods of containment.

“Had the U.S. been better prepared and responded faster,” Madad said, perhaps “lockdowns could have been avoided.”