Chinese Doc Tells Compatriots: To Avoid Monkepox, Don't Touch Foreigners

An official of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) has issued a most unscientific approach in preventing the spread of monkeypox after Beijing recorded its first case of the largely non-fatal infection: Don’t touch foreigners.

Photo Insert: Wu wrote on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo on Saturday that the country’s COVID-19 restrictions and tight border controls had thus far prevented the spread of monkeypox — until a case “slipped through the net.”

CDCP’s chief epidemiologist Wu Zonyou issued the advice after an “international arrival” in Chongqing tested positive for the disease, Jessie Yeung reported for CNN.

Wu wrote on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo on Saturday that the country’s COVID-19 restrictions and tight border controls had thus far prevented the spread of monkeypox — until a case “slipped through the net.”

Apparently, Wu failed to to realize that China also exported COVID-19, with the first fatalities in the Philippines being tourists from Wuhan, the confirmed epicenter of the pandemic.

Nonetheless, xenophobia is probably endemic in China, with Caucasians subjected to slurs for having “colonized” imperial China, and all other foreigners are similar to “white devils.”

Beijing has been tragically insisting that COVID-19 started somewhere else on the planet and not in Wuhan’s Huanan exotic food market, where viruses intermingled and mutated into the dreaded coronavirus.

They are now swabbing fish and sanitizing containers of imported food items on suspicion they harbor both COVID-19 and monkeypox viruses. China does not believe these diseases are endemic in China but cannot explain why outbreaks have become recurrent, indicating that China harbors those “domesticated” viruses.

The recommendation stirred controversy on Weibo, with some praising his advice as reasonable and some expressing relief that they didn’t know many foreigners.

“It’s good to open the country’s door, but we can’t just let everything in,” one Weibo user wrote. But others slammed Wu’s post as discriminatory and harmful, with several drawing parallels to the wave of xenophobia and violence Asians overseas faced at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This is a bit like when the pandemic began, when some people overseas avoided any Chinese people they saw out of fear,” a Weibo user wrote. “I don’t believe these two things have any scientific basis, they are too broad and will exacerbate public panic.”

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