MERS. SARS. The common cold. These are all coronaviruses. So why is COVID-19, the “Wuhan Flu”, almost universally dubbed coronavirus?
It’s stupid, on every level. It’s like calling the Bugatti Veyron “car”. It might be the fastest, baddest of the recent crop, but it’s not the only, or the most common, car in the world. Almost every other disease, coronaviruses included, are given a unique name, often tied to their epicentre. So, why isn’t “coronavirus” more commonly referred to as either COVID-19 (its unique name) or Wuhan Flu (its epicentre)?
Because the Chinese Communist Party wishes it. And their useful idiots in the West are only too happy to play along.
There is now a very stupid debate being waged over whether we should call COVID-19 “the Wuhan virus” and whether it is racist to draw any link between the pandemic and China. A number of high profile Democrats have made this issue a top priority. Representatives Ayana Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have taken it a step further and accused Americans of racism for allegedly refusing to eat at Chinese restaurants because of the virus. Other intellectuals and luminaries like Samantha Bee have weighed in, reiterating the claim that “tying coronavirus to China” is “racist.”
I say again: this is very stupid.
No one complains of “racism” when anyone refers to other diseases by linking them to regions or countries. No one is raged at as being “speciesist” for referring to Bird Flu or Swine Flu.
What some people are pointing out is the simple fact that the virus began its career in Wuhan, China. A great many illnesses are named after the places where they began or were discovered: West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, German measles, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, etc. Ebola is named after a river in Africa. We call the 1918 influenza pandemic “the Spanish flu” for no real reason at all. The flu didn’t start there, wasn’t discovered there, and didn’t hit Spain any harder than anywhere else. If Spain has to own a pandemic they didn’t start, why shouldn’t China own one they did start?
Because the Chinese communist regime, like all authoritarian regimes, refuses to shoulder responsibilities for disasters of its own making. Instead, they are obsessed with secrecy and shifting blame. When tens of millions starved during the Great Leap Forward, Mao blamed Russia for food shortages. The Soviets, after concealing the truth about Chernobyl for as long as they could, tried to shift blame, claiming that the West was trying to “defame” the Soviet Union and cover for their own wrongs.
COVID-19 is China’s Chernobyl.
But there is more to this than the mere happenstance of Wuhan being the epicenter of the disease. The Chinese government is in many ways responsible for allowing the virus to spread so far and so rapidly. In the early days of the outbreak, they responded much like the Soviets did to Chernobyl. They moved slowly at first, seemingly more concerned with stopping the spread of information about the disease than stopping the spread of the disease itself. Medical experts were censored and doctors were prevented from warning the world and each other about the true severity of the illness. Some of the early whistleblowers are now dead. But the fact that there had to be whistleblowers in the first place should tell you what you need to know. Even now, people from within China are telling us that the government is still lying, still claiming it has everything under control when the reality is quite different.
Instead of playing Beijing’s propaganda for them, lay blame where it’s deserved.
Why shouldn’t we hang this around the Chinese government’s neck and make them wear it? Especially now that they are attempting to turn the tables and, outrageously enough, blame the US for creating the outbreak. Democrats are more than happy to echo communist propaganda if it means landing a blow on Trump. But even as someone who has been, to put it mildly, unimpressed with the Trump Administration’s response to the crisis so far, the fact is that this didn’t start with Trump. It started with China. And their dishonesty, misdirection, and propaganda made it far worse than it had to be.
As YouTuber laowhy86 says, if Beijing has its way, “it will be kind of like Tiananmen Square”. Beijing will lie and the lie will become its official version of the truth. They can’t be allowed to get away with it.
One small way is to stop pandering, by calling this “coronavirus”. Call it COVID-19, call it Wuhan Flu. It’s not “racist”, it’s the truth.
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