Hospitals are overflowing with children suffering from mysterious antibiotic-resistant pneumonia or similar severe ailments in large cities across China. The Chinese government continues to claim that no new pathogen has been found and that the surge in chest infections is due simply to the usual winter coughs and colds.
The ruling class also claims that the infections are “aggravated” by the lifting of the stringent COVID-19 restrictions in December 2022. The World Health Organization (WHO) has dutifully repeated this reassurance as if it learned nothing from Beijing’s disastrous cover-up of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a report by Foreign Policy.
Fears of another novel respiratory pathogen emerging from China are understandable after the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics, both of which Beijing covered up. Concerns are amplified by Beijing’s ongoing obstruction of any independent investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19—whether it accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab performing dangerous gain-of-function research or derived from the illegal trade in raccoon dogs and other wildlife at the now-infamous Wuhan wet-market. –Foreign Policy