China's recent pneumonia outbreak raises serious questions, and the World Health Organization is asking them. It's time to abandon COVID deception and delays as transparent and timely information saves lives. Full cooperation with the international community is not an option,…

— ラーム・エマニュエル駐日米国大使 (@USAmbJapan) November 24, 2023

Doctors and health agencies in China believe Covid, RSV, flu and mycoplasma pneumoniae, a common bacterial disease also known as ‘walking pneumonia,’ are responsible for the surge.

They claim these illnesses are causing harsher illness because children’s immunity was weakened during the country’s strict lockdowns – which is not dissimilar to what happened in the US and UK last year.

But there are still doubts about China’s transparency and many point to the eerie similarities between this outbreak and the initial weeks of the Covid crisis.

China covered up the original SARS epidemic in 2003 and its delay in reporting Covid in late 2019 left countries flat-footed in their responses.

[And the apparatchiks at WHO are still covering for Beijing, too. Interesting to see this from Biden’s ambassador to Japan, but I bet it will be very enthusiastically received by the Japanese. — Ed]