Pneumonia cases in children are unexpectedly surging in the Netherlands at an alarming rate — at the same time as China continues to grapple with a tidal wave of respiratory illnesses threatening to overwhelm its hospitals.
Last week, 80 out of every 100,000 children in the Netherlands between ages 5 and 15 were treated for pneumonia, reported the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (NIVEL).
Pneumonia cases among tots ages 4 and under were also on the rise, jumping from 124 to 145 per 100,000.
This is the biggest pneumonia outbreak the Utrecht-based research institute has recorded in recent years.
For comparison, at the height of the flu season in 2022, there were 60 recorded cases of every 100,000 children in the 5-to-15 age group.
Neither NIVEL nor the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands could offer an explanation for the sudden uptick in pneumonia cases among children.
It is unknown whether the worrying health trend seen in Europe is connected to the disturbing rise in mystery respiratory illnesses that were sweeping across parts of China. --->READ MORE HERE
A former Trump administration official has claimed “it’s certainly possible” the Chinese government killed a Wuhan scientist who may have caused the COVID pandemic by secretly working on a vaccine months before the global health crisis broke out.
Dr. Robert Kadlec, who served as an official in the biodefense and epidemic response departments during the pandemic, said Chinese military scientist Dr. Zhou Yusen was conducting research on live animals at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019, and filed a patent for a COVID vaccine in February 2020 — barely one month after China put Wuhan into a lockdown due to the first outbreak.
Three months later, Zhou died when he allegedly fell from the roof of the Wuhan Institute.
“It looked like he was censored as a consequence of whatever happened,” Kadlec told Australia’s Sky News.
“Our evidence would suggest that something happened while he was doing his work, which we believe was when the virus first emerged,” he said.
“And whether he was held accountable through some formal proceeding or not, he was certainly dead by July [2020].”
When asked whether he thought it was possible Zhou was killed for starting the pandemic, Kadlec replied, “It’s certainly possible, we considered that as a plausible possibility, however, we had no evidence to make that assessment.”
Zhou’s quick turnaround of a COVID vaccine sparked concerns that the Wuhan Institute was secretly working on a vaccine months before Beijing admitted to the outbreak of the novel virus.
US vaccine developers have told government investigators it would have taken at least three months to generate the data cited in Zhou’s patent, suggesting he was working on it at least two months before Chinese officials announced the new virus. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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