WHO calls for masking, physical distancing over ‘mystery’ illness
The World Health Organization (WHO) is telling Chinese citizens to wear face masks, keep physical distance, and stay home amid an outbreak of a “mystery respiratory illness.”
Media reports say hospitals in Beijing and Liaoning are overwhelmed with cases of “undiagnosed pneumonia” primarily affecting kids. The children are presenting symptoms of lung inflammation and high fever, but not the coughing associated with COVID-19, RSV or other illnesses.
Chinese officials first announced the outbreak on November 13th, which they reportedly blamed on the absence of lockdown restrictions. The WHO has asked that Chinese people distance themselves from each other, stay home if they feel unwell, and return to masking. Classes are on the verge of being suspended as more children become infected.
In response to a demand from WHO officials that the Chinese government share “detailed information” on the illness, Chinese authorities said it is not a new virus but common winter illnesses causing the hospitalizations. The bugs are hitting harder due to lowered immune systems caused by pandemic restrictions.
“Chinese authorities advised that there has been no detection of any unusual or novel pathogens or unusual clinical presentations,” read an update from the WHO.
Nevertheless, the United Kingdom has signaled it may be considering a return to mandates like forced masking.
“We need to keep an open mind about the cause of any increased reporting of clusters of disease including of this illness in Chinese children,” said UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) Professor Dame Jenny Harries, adding that UKHSA will “respond as more information becomes available.”
Harries has been leading an effort to develop a vaccine for the next pandemic which she said would be caused by “climate change.” Scientists in a British high-security laboratory have been developing vaccines for a new pandemic involving “Disease X.”
"What we're seeing is a rising risk globally,” said Harries, adding, "And some of it is because of climate change where you get things like ticks and mosquitoes moving to where it was previously cold and is now becoming increasingly warm.”
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Another prediction made about the next pandemic was that it would target children.
In October 2022, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-hosted a pandemic simulation exercise named Catastrophic Contagion. The simulation was attended by Gates himself along with 13 other participants, including senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India and Germany.
Participants had to react to a fictional pandemic set in the future which originated in a certain point of the globe and spread around the world. Unlike COVID-19, which in the main was not a threat to children and young people, Catastrophic Contagion engineered a pandemic that was more lethal and targeted those populations specifically.
In January, Gates warned that a new pandemic is afoot which may be “man-made” and “far more brutal.” He blamed the failed response to COVID-19 in part on “a particularly dangerous form of populism” whose connection to US healthcare is “a bit concerning” and praised authoritarian responses like Australia’s and China’s.
Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris earlier this year explained why it is important to totalitarians like himself that the next pandemic specifically targets children. Harris said society was “unlucky” that the coronavirus did not target children, because child victims would eliminate “vaccine skepticism.”
I mean, just think about—leave COVID exactly as it is, but just make it preferentially dangerous to children rather than to old people, right? You just flip that around, the variable of age. If kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from COVID at a rate of whatever it was, you know, one percents, say, but it was pretty much all kids – we would have had a very different experience, right? And the patience, there would have been no f*cking patience for vaccine skepticism, right? And everyone would have recognized that this is not ‘my body, my choice’, this is ‘you’re not gonna kill my kids with your ignorance’, right?
