China’s Children Hit Hard by ‘Unusual' Rapidly Infectious Disease

Doctors and disease experts said the infection surge in children may be related to COVID-19 mutations.

Children and their parents wait at an outpatient area at a children hospital in Beijing on Nov. 23, 2023. Jade Gao/AFP

A sudden rise in infection cases with fever symptoms broke out among large numbers of youngsters in various parts of China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) blamed the surge on mycoplasma pneumonia, while ProMED, an international medical organization, considers it an “undiagnosed” and “unusual” quickly-spreading respiratory disease based on the symptoms.

This outbreak among children has been rapidly spreading across multiple provinces and cities in China since November. On Nov. 22 alone, nearly 3,000 outpatients and requests for fluid infusion occurred at Beijing Children’s Hospital. On the same day, hundreds of minors, accompanied by anxious parents or relatives, lined up at the emergency rooms of Peking University’s First Hospital of Obstetrics and Pediatrics and the Beijing Pediatric Research Institute Hospital.

ProMED, an infectious disease surveillance system of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, deemed the outbreak “an undiagnosed respiratory illness” and said it would be “unusual for so many children to be affected so quickly.”

According to ProMED, fever was the main symptom in Chinese children, and many had pulmonary nodules, while mycoplasma pneumonia usually results in “patchy infiltrates,” not pulmonary nodules.

ProMED’s diagnosis is equivalent to indirectly disputing the CCP top health body’s claim that the outbreak was caused by mycoplasma pneumonia.

China’s Ministry of Health has informed the World Health Organization (WHO) that mycoplasma pneumonia, a typical seasonal bacterium, causes the ongoing childhood respiratory disease. “Chinese authorities advised that there has been no detection of any unusual or novel pathogens or unusual clinical presentations,” WHO said in a Nov. 23 statement.

Since the communist ruling party lifted stringent zero-COVID approaches at the end of last year, the number of infections has skyrocketed. However, for a whole year, the CCP government has attempted to conceal the truth of the epidemic, attributing the infection cases to respiratory diseases or other conditions such as influenza.

Doctors and Virologists Cast Doubts

Other medical professionals also suspect that mycoplasma pneumonia did not lead to the outbreak.

Dr. Li at Beijing’s Changping District Hospital the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times the outbreak’s causative agent is “most likely a variant of the COVID virus.”

A resident in northeastern China’s Jilin Province, who wishes to remain unnamed for fear of retaliation, told NTD TV that her two children have “white lungs.” A doctor revealed to her privately that this was a type of COVID that nucleic acid tests cannot detect.

Wang Ye (Pseudonym), a pediatrician at a Beijing hospital, was diagnosed with “Mycoplasma pneumonia,” similar to her other patients. Despite undergoing all available treatments for the disease, she did not get any improvement.

So, Ms. Wang suspects that she did not have Mycoplasma pneumonia but instead suffered from a different disease, “Mycoplasma pneumonia may not be the source of the current wave of infections,” she told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on Nov.26.

Lin Xiaoxu, a U.S.-based virologist, pointed out that Mycoplasma pneumonia is less likely to cause lung conditions such as “white lung” and can be effectively controlled with antibiotics that target it.

Mr. Lin believes that “it is probable that a novel variant of COVID-19 has emerged, possibly incorporating more than two distinct types of viruses and germs.”

Mr. Lin told the publication that COVID-19 has never moved away from China, indicating that the CCP always uses “influenza A” or “mycoplasma pneumonia” or other diseases to cover up the truth.

It remains a secret the true death toll and infections in the epidemic, and how the virus evolved in China.

Childhood Pneumonia Outbreaks

Since November, there has been a surge in hospital visits in part of China; most of the infected groups in this wave of the epidemic are children, with collective cases among families or school classes.

A doctor at Beijing New Century Children’s Hospital told the publication the hospital is full of children suffering from pneumonia, and every day all the appointments are full. On Nov. 19, there were no available appointments and one could only go to the outpatient clinic site and queue up to wait for a temporary additional number.

On Nov. 20, a pediatrician at a hospital in Quzhou in the eastern coastal Zhejiang Province said that they have been washing the lungs of nearly 80 to 90 people every day during this period, primarily children, and all inpatient beds are full.

Ms. Wang of northeastern Liaoning province’s Dalian city said on Nov. 20 that the outbreak was concentrated in the city and was so severe that she couldn’t book a hospital bed. Her daughter, who attends elementary school, began to have a fever and cough on Nov. 2, and after seven days of 41-degree fever, she was hospitalized at Dalian Children’s Hospital for 15 days.

A doctor looking at a lung CT image while making his rounds at a ward of a quarantine zone in Wuhan, the epicenter of the new coronavirus outbreak, in China's central Hubei Province, on Feb. 3, 2020. STR/AFP via Getty Images

Ms. Bai, who lived in Zhongshan District, Dalian city of the same province, said that her little son almost died of “acute bronchitis” diagnosed by the hospital. Ms. Bai said her son was sent to the hospital after he began coughing around Oct. 20 and then began to cough violently and had a persistent high fever. The hospital gave him an azithromycin medication infusion for a week but did not have an effect, and the cough and fever became more severe, along with diarrhea, inability to eat anything, nasal congestion, and other symptoms.

She said it wasn’t until the lungs were washed that her son’s condition improved.

In 2019, a wave of mysterious pneumonia infections originated in Wuhan and spread from China to the world, causing millions of deaths. The virus causing this wave of epidemics was named COVID-19. After the CCP stopped its zero-COVID policy in December 2022, hospitals nationwide were overcrowded, morgues were full, and crematoriums had long queues.

The founder of Falun Dafa, a peaceful spiritual practice rooted in Buddist tradition, Li Hongzhi, wrote in March 2020 in “Stay Rational” that “But a pandemic like the current Chinese Communist Virus (or “Wuhan Virus”) comes with a purpose behind it, and it has targets. It is here to weed out members of the Party and those who have sided with it.”

Mr. Li said that behind the CCP is the “red Devil” and that “the divine is starting to eradicate it, all who still stand by it shall perish.”

Children in Communist China

From the onset of the COVID outbreak in Hubei Province’s Wuhan to the widespread epidemics that have rippled across the globe, and now the “undiagnosed” infectious diseases targeting vulnerable children, the CCP has adopted the approach of covering up the truth.

In its indifference to human life and its ideological indoctrination over the human mind, the CCP does not spare even children. Over the past few years, the CCP has stepped up its efforts to indoctrinate Chinese children in “party-loving education” and other brainwashing with communist ideology.

In May 2021, CCP leader Xi Jinping released in the party magazine Qiushi that education on revolutionary traditions should start with teenagers so that the “red genes can permeate their blood and hearts.”

In 2020, Bitter Winter, an Italy-based magazine focusing on China’s human rights, found that the CCP has intensified party education in schools nationwide since the end of 2019, coinciding with the first stage of the COVID epidemic.

Students do paper-cutting portraits of the late former Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong ahead of his 127th birthday which falls on December 26, in Lianyungang in eastern China's Jiangsu province on Dec. 23, 2020. STR/AFP via Getty Images

According to Bitter Winter’s report, at the end of October 2019, children from a kindergarten in Jiangxi Province dressed in the costumes of CCP’s Red Army and the Eighth Route, two armed forces of the party during the revolutionary period, in a military and civilian production event. They were requested to shout the slogan, “One Red Heart to the Sun, One Red Heart to the Party.”

A “National Defense Education Training Base” was set up in May 2020 in Heze of Shandong province and was geared toward minors between the ages of 6 and 16 for up to 40 days. A local official in the event said, “Red successors must be trained from an early age. If they are 17 or 18 years old and have their ideas, it will be challenging to change them.”

On Sept. 1 that year, pupils at an elementary school in Heilongjiang province attended their first communist indoctrination of the new school year. The slogan of the classroom was written on the blackboard: “Prepare to fight for the cause of communism! Be ready at all times!” About two weeks later, Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited an elementary school in Chenzhou, Hunan Province, reiterating that the “red gene should be embodied in children.”

The communist regime’s systematic and deliberate undermining of minors can be traced back to the very beginning of the Party when it claimed to be training Chinese children to be the “successors of communism.”

In July 1922, the CCP’s Second National Congress was held in Shanghai and passed the Resolution on the Question of the Youth Movement. The resolution stressed the “urgency and importance of organizing a youth movement.” Successively, the CCP organized a general strike that year in which children’s groups participated by wearing red neckties and carrying wooden sticks. Five years later, during the campaign to fight against the landlords, the children’s group was taught to join in criticizing and monitoring the landlords.

In January 1949, CCP’s Central Committee promulgated a resolution on establishing the Youth League, which requested the league to dispatch “the best cadres” to lead the so-called children and youth and set up relevant units under the Youth League of all levels.