By Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp
February 24, 2023 Updated: February 24, 2023
Dr. Sean Lin, a former
U.S. Army microbiologist, and currently an assistant professor in the
Biomedical Science Department at Feitian College in Middletown, New York is
interviewed on EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program on Feb. 12, 2023..(Screenshot/
Epoch TV)
The official number of
COVID-19 deaths in China is far from real, judging by the growth in the funeral
industry, according to a former U.S. Army microbiologist. The communist regime
keeps covering up the actual number to tout its zero-COVID lockdown policy as successful.
When the Chinese
communist regime abruptly ended its strictly enforced zero-COVID policy in
effect for the past three years, an unprecedented outbreak of the virus had
already begun in the final months of the policy.
“It was like a bomb
cyclone of the virus,” said Dr. Sean Lin, a former U.S. Army microbiologist,
currently an assistant professor in the Biomedical Science Department at
Feitian College in Middletown, New York, and a member of the Committee on the
Present Danger: China.
The new wave of COVID-19
infection in China was so severe that it covered a large area of the country,
Lin said in an interview on EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program on Feb.
2.
As of Jan. 8, the Chinese
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) only reported a
cumulative total of 5,272 COVID-19
deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.
However, after the regime
relaxed its zero-COVID restrictions, the same institution suddenly announced that from Dec. 8, 2022, to Jan.
12, 2023, China had accumulated nearly 60,000 deaths from COVID-19 infection.
This figure is taken from a CCDC report.
Cover-up
The Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) has been covering up the actual number of infections from the beginning
of the pandemic outbreak, Lin said. “So we don’t know actually, even at the
early Wuhan outbreak, how many people died due to that early wave of
infection.”
For the last three years,
the CCP has continued emphasizing that due to its very strict zero-COVID
policy, the regime has “successfully contained the infection” and “helped save
many people’s lives,” Lin said.
However, on social media,
a lot of people talk about how many people got infected or tested positive for
COVID in their cities, and that due to COVID, many went to the hospital, many
had severe symptoms, and many died, Lin said.
There are also reports
about long lines for funeral services and people delivering the corpses of
their loved ones to the crematories using their own cars, Lin continued. “I see
so many different videos from so many different cities, and the number definitely
cannot match the government’s version.”
“I believe that a
tremendous number of people died in China even in just the last two months, but
the government keeps lying about it. And it’s a very, very tragic situation
that so many people die and the government doesn’t even count their deaths as
COVID deaths,” Lin said.
The Chinese regime keeps
restricting the definition of COVID deaths, he said. Nowadays, crematories even
tell people who deliver their relatives’ bodies that they cannot put COVID-19
as the cause of death or the corpses will be denied cremation, Lin explained.
“So people are forced to lie, otherwise their family’s body cannot be cremated.
So it’s a very, very deep cover-up.”
Lin said he analyzed the
numbers released by the Chinese civil administration that showed the growth in
the crematory and funeral services, the increase in the number of incinerators,
and the growing employment in the funeral service industry.
“All these numbers have a
significant jump in years 2020 and 2021,” he said. Lin thinks these numbers can
only be explained by the increased number of deaths in the last two or three
years when China implemented the zero-COVID policy. “There’s no other reason to
explain it.”
China Model
Many public health
officials worldwide, including high-ranking officials, followed China’s model
in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing measures such as lockdowns, severe quarantines, and social
distancing in their countries, Lin said.
They based their
decisions on the official data from the Chinese regime, the only source of
information about COVID in China they could get.
Many people believe that
although the zero-COVID policy was too harsh and caused some collateral damage,
that at least it successfully contained the pandemic, Lin said.“That’s actually
a very, very false illusion that many people have, because the CCP kept lying
about it for the last three years.”
Lin pointed out that the
zero-COVID approach made the whole Chinese population more vulnerable to the
disease because it deprived people of a healthy lifestyle. He said that people
needed to be exposed to the natural environment, to breathe fresh air, and eat
a normal diet.
Moreover, people under
lockdown experienced severe mental stress and anxiety. To release it, many
confined to their high-rise residences were yelling out in the evenings from
their windows and balconies.
The following article
contains a video clip showing people in Shanghai chanting,
“We want supplies!” during a prolonged citywide COVID lockdown.
Consequences of Zero-COVID Policy
Lin said the entire
Chinese population is actually suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to prolonged
lockdowns, and many people’s immune systems were critically weakened during
those months. This resulted in many becoming severely infected when the huge
viral infection exploded in China.
The situation was further
aggravated by the severe shortage of basic medicines, including drugs to reduce
fever, Lin said. Drug production in China is fully controlled by the communist
regime, which failed to produce sufficient quantities of these drugs during the
zero-COVID period, he explained.
Many pharmaceutical
companies and pharmacies in China that produced and sold cold and flu
medication went bankrupt because of the zero-COVID restrictions. The remaining
factories weren’t given enough notice to adequately prepare for a sudden
increase in demand after the restrictions were lifted.
In addition, pharmacies
in China were ordered to ban
or control the sale of these drugs under the zero-COVID policy to prevent
residents from using over-the-counter drugs to reduce or mask fevers, a symptom
of COVID-19. By concealing a fever, Chinese people tried to circumvent harsh
COVID policies, such as mandatory PCR tests or forced transition to centralized
quarantine facilities.
As a result, people
infected with COVID could not get medicines to reduce a fever, so more people
had severe symptoms, more were admitted to the intensive care unit, and more
died, Lin explained.
Impact on Older Population
There are three Chinese
pharmaceutical companies that manufacture COVID-19 vaccines—Sinovac and
Sinopharm make inactivated virus vaccines,
while CanSino Biologics produces a vaccine based on a genetically engineered adenovirus—but
none of them have data on how their vaccines affect people older than 60, Lin
said. “There’s no clinical trial [in China] recruiting these kind of
people for testing.”
Now the CCP is saying
that the vaccine campaign did not sufficiently target seniors, and that is why
more seniors are getting severe COVID-19 symptoms, Lin said.
Although the efficacy of
Chinese vaccines is relatively low, they are being promoted in China and abroad
because the CCP props up their promotion through the World Health Organization,
Lin said.
China already has a huge
elderly population due to its one-child policy, and older people are at higher risk of serious COVID symptoms, so
protecting them should be a focus of public health policies.
The one-child policy
introduced in China in 1979 lasted nearly four decades and made the Chinese
society unsustainable from a population perspective, Lin said.
The regime relaxed the one-child policy in
2016, allowing a two-child limit per family, then a three-child limit in July
2021. A year later, the authorities even allowed couples in some regions to
have up to four children, under
certain conditions.
Despite these efforts,
China had 191 million people over 65 in
2020, which was 13.5 percent of its population. By 2057, the number of people
over 65 in China is expected to peak at 425 million, accounting for 32.9
percent to 37.6 percent of China’s total population.
The number of elderly
people who need care in China has exceeded 45 million and is expected to reach
60 million by 2030, according to a recent survey.
Lin believes that “the
Chinese government [is] actually taking advantage of the pandemic outbreak as a
new strategy to readjust society’s structure.”
The Chinese regime’s
common policy nowadays seems to be to let whoever can get infected, get
infected, and even create conditions to try to get more people infected, Lin
said.
Many older people have
comorbidity issues, so many of them will die from COVID-19. Judging from the
limited social media posts we’re seeing from China with videos of funerals and
families mourning in cities and the countryside, we know that many seniors have
died in China.
Many elderly people get
infected, and many of them have severe symptoms, but they cannot be treated
because the hospitals are overloaded, Lin said. “In the countryside, the
overall health system support is even weaker.”
Why the Effectiveness of COVID-19 Measures
Varies
“One of the biggest
lessons that we should learn in the last three years of the pandemic is that
what we understand about the virus is very limited,” Lin said. The start of the
outbreak, the variants that will emerge, and how they will dominate different
regions cannot be forecast.
It is not known how many
viruses actually targeted each area during the peak of the infection, and there
is no model that can predict this, the microbiologist explained.
He likened the virus
spread to a sandstorm where particles of sand land on a particular area, except
that viruses are microscopic, much smaller than sand particles and not visible
to the human eye.
The viral load was so
severe when it landed in China that it covered pretty much everything in the
entire country, yet people could not see it, Lin said.
It was so easy for people
in China to get infected. People who mostly stayed at home tested positive for
COVID after barely going out.
The severity of the
pandemic in different regions and countries varied greatly and depended on the
amount of virus that landed on a particular region, Lin said. Therefore, the
effectiveness of measures applied in response to the pandemic also varied, he
explained.
Some countries such as
Africa—where very loose measures were applied—were not very affected by the
pandemic, while others, including some Western countries with very strict
lockdown and social distancing policies, still experienced waves of pandemic
infection, Lin said.
“Many parts of the
epidemiology, I think, need to be revised. We need to open our minds to see
that we have very limited understanding and [try] to understand the virus
epidemiology on the grand scale,” he said.
Rita Li, Jenny Li, Sean Tseng, Anne Zhang, Angela Bright, Makai
Allbert, Stephanie Zhang, and Yuhong Dong contributed to this report.
Opinion:
I think the Chinese communist wants to rob the social
security, health insurance of the elderly, retirees (if they die from covid), and may be the saving money in the bank
will also be “lost”...
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