China deserves to be connected to the virus that it loosed on the world.
The coronavirus outbreak is the first pandemic of the woke era, and as such, it isn’t surprising that there is a fierce debate over how to refer to it without offending against social justice.
Representative Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, lost whatever sympathy he would have garnered in certain quarters over his self-quarantine when he called it “the Wuhan virus,” a perfectly appropriate name that has been deemed grotesque and unacceptable.
Wuhan is in China, a non-Western country, and people of color live there, so QED, calling the virus by the name of that city must be racist.
Luminaries across the Left denounced Gosar. They accused him of bringing what is technically the SARS-CoV-2 virus to our shores by misnaming it.
Representative Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) slammed the Republican lawmaker’s reference to the Wuhan virus as “an example of the myopia that allowed it to spread in the U.S. The virus is not constrained by country or race.”
Obviously, Gosar is fully aware of this, or as a Caucasian living in the United States, he wouldn’t be isolating himself on the off chance he is infected and might spread the virus to others.
Nonetheless, the virus first became known in Wuhan, in cases clustered around a wildlife market, and the locked-down city has remained the epicenter of the Chinese epidemic ever since. As of mid-February, the Wuhan area accounted for 86 percent of all the cases in China.
Naturally enough, the virus is associated with Wuhan, and indeed has commonly been referred to as “the Wuhan virus” in the press (at least prior to the World Health Organization’s formally naming the virus and the disease).
Naming a virus after the location of the outbreak that first brought it to attention is hardly unusual.
The West Nile virus emerged in the West Nile district of Northern Uganda in the 1930s. It is similar to the St. Louis encephalitis virus, which broke out around St. Louis, Mo., in 1933, and the Japanese encephalitis virus, which caused outbreaks in Japan beginning in the 1870s.
Coxsackie in New York state, Marburg in Germany, and Hendra in Australia all have viruses named after them.
MERS, caused by a virus first identified in 2012, stands for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or even more offensively, the camel flu.
No one had a fainting fit over any of this, but we live in a more sensitive, and absurd, time.
The WHO issued guidelines a couple of years ago warning against naming diseases after geographic locations, or animals (swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), or membership organizations or occupations (Legionnaires’ disease). With regard to the latest outbreak, the WHO has warned that “certain words and language may have a negative meaning for people and fuel stigmatizing attitudes.”
There is no doubt that a raging virus that got its start in China and has shut all of Italy and caused disruption and fear around the world may create negative associations around China. This would happen regardless of the name, though.
Chinese officials still want to squelch the use of “Wuhan virus,” whereas Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is perfectly content to refer to the virus that way.
Such international contention over the name of a virus or disease isn’t new. Syphilis was the Neapolitan disease, the French disease, or the Polish disease, depending on who was naming it. The 1918 influenza came to be known as “the Spanish flu,” although Spaniards called it “the French flu.”
There was actually no good reason for naming the flu after the Spanish. The case of China is different. Its government tried to suppress warnings about the new coronavirus and looked the other way, giving it the room to become a national and then a global crisis.
China deserves to be connected to the virus it did more than its share to loose on the world, no matter what its foreign ministry or the sensitivity police say.
© 2020 by King Features Syndicate