The surge in respiratory illnesses seen across China does not indicate a new pandemic could be headed to the U.S., retired Adm. Brett Giroir told Newsmax on Thursday.
The World Health Organization recently requested that China provide information about a potentially worrying spike in respiratory illnesses and clusters of pneumonia in children, as mentioned by several media reports and a global infectious disease monitoring service.
Giroir, a pediatrician and former U.S. assistant secretary for health, discussed the situation during an appearance on "National Report."
"It is serious for China. It's just not another COVID," Giroir told co-hosts Shaun Kraisman and Emma Rechenberg.
"And it's not something that we have to worry about, spreading over here to our shores."
Giroir, who served as the Trump administration's coronavirus testing czar, said he understood why people might be skeptical about reports concerning the respiratory syncytial virus infection (RSV) in China.
"I think we should all be skeptical when there is a system that does not have transparency," Giroir said. "However, from the best information we have, including my sources around the world, in the U.S. government, and looking at the epidemiology, this looks like an outbreak of typical winter virus diseases and one bacterial disease that we normally see in children.
"But this is magnified to a huge extent … because they were locked down for three years in a really draconian way. So, there's three years of an immune debt, if you might say, where children did not have normal exposures to these viruses, or they got exposed to them at a later time in their infancy when they didn't have partial protection from their mom, and you're seeing an explosion of these diseases."
The admiral said that, to a lesser degree, the U.S. saw "a bump" in RSV last year.
"Our lockdowns were relatively minor compared to China, but we still had an upsurge in flu and RSV, particularly in children last year, so we had our little bump that we had," he said "But in China, it's magnified.
"When the Chinese let up their restrictions for COVID, the estimates are …. there were up to a billion cases of COVID over two months in China. So this is the degree that the lockdown sort of sheltered people, but they're paying the piper right now."
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