I don't think they were, do you have any evidence for that assertion?

Reuters wire service reported an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia causing disease in Wuhan in December of 2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/31/reuters-america-chinese-offi...

So did AFP, which resulted in sites like Yahoo covering it.

The only two articles on Zero Hedge to reference pneumonia between Nov 1 2019 and Jan 1 2020 are a link about two people caught the plague (which was never eradicated) in Beijing (not Wuhan): https://www.zerohedge.com/health/fears-pneumonic-plague-outb...

And an unrelated article about superbugs, antibiotic resistant bacteria.