Terry Glavin: Beijing once again deceiving the world about COVID — but this time, we’re not buying it

With only days to go before the authorities in Beijing fully throw open the passport exit doors to anyone among China’s 1.4-billion people with the inclination and the wherewithal to at least temporarily escape Xi Jinping’s dystopian laboratory in failed pandemic controls, we can all take heart in some reassuring news.

It’s not much to cheer about, but at least the newly dominant XBB.1.5 mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant doesn’t appear to be any deadlier than its predecessors. More importantly, while we’re not out of the woods yet, at least we’re allowing ourselves to admit that we can see the forest behind all those trees.

It was Beijing’s sinister disinformation, propaganda and deadly cover-ups that helped unleash the deadly coronavirus upon the world in the first place, making 665-million people sick, killing 6.7-million people and bringing the global economy to its knees.

The pandemic is far from over, but at least the World Health Organization (WHO) isn’t quite the willing accomplice it was in those first crucial weeks of 2020. That’s when Beijing went into overdrive, denying that there was a problem at all, then insisting that SARS-CoV-2 was no worse than a seasonal flu, then denying that there was any evidence it was contagious, then insisting that it was the United States that brought the disease to China.