How does it help to blame a buffoon like Trump more than Xi and the CCP when it was policy for the Chinese government to hide and deny the truth? Maybe calling it the CCP virus would assign blame where it rightly belongs without tarring an entire nation?
That misses the point. The OP, and apparently this debate, is about whether or not people think applying this label, the “Wuhan virus”, is bad because it stigmatizes the population of this supposedly well-known city. No mention was made of the broader problem of xenophobia or racism, effectively reducing it to the level of a dispute over which city has the better deep dish pizza or why [insert sports team] sucks so hard while [insert competing sports team from home town] rocks.
It takes the “let’s stop emphasizing the overseas origin of this virus, particular to China, when it comes to efforts to combat its spread so that we don’t turn this into a cause celebre for a bunch of xenophobic racists” position and reduces it to a straw man of “hey, don’t call it the Wuhan virus because that’s mean to the people of Wuhan that you might interact with in every day life since it’s such a big and well known city.”
It strikes me as a straw man with a side of question begging.
Politics I guess
I’m betting there’s more backlash about “Wuhan fever” because of the increase in political correctness since a lot of the prior examples you gave. I’m not saying PC is bad or good - I realize this isn’t the thread for it and I think it highly depends on the context, anyway. But you really can’t ignore the fact that it’s become more and more important to a broad number of people and has continued to increase in more recent years. It’s almost become a competition for some people, it seems.
When I first heard of the WHO guidelines to not name diseases after places because of the possibility of racism or xenophobia, I thought it was absurd. Who would be so idiotic as to blame a people just because they were the first ones to get sick?
I’ve since learned, lots of folks would be that idiotic.
Two years ago, his administration made a 75% reduction to an Obama-era initiative aimed at stopping potential epidemics before they cross borders and China was one of those countries cut out.
Yes.
I quoted you and answered the question you asked directly. If you wanted a different question answered, you should have asked a different question.
Your argument strikes me as idiotic and self-absorbed. The question was “who decided this was stigmatizing?” and the answer is “the people who name diseases because people told them it was stigmatizing to have a disease named after the place they lived.”
My point is not so much, “is it right to call it Wuhan virus or not,” as it is, “Why aren’t the other names - Zika, Ebola, Rift Valley, West Nile, Japanese encephalitis, Lassa fever, Nipah virus, etc. considered problematic?”
I wouldn’t mind “Wuhan Virus” but “Coronavirus” seems to be the name that stuck, and is fine for everyday conversations and journalism because everyone knows which coronavirus you’re talking about. I wouldn’t want any variety of “fever” in the name as that might make people less worried about spreading it if they don’t have a fever.
Any variety of “China” would go against the nomenclature of specificity we’ve been building up over the past half-century or so, and sounds just as out of touch as using the words “Oriental” or “Negro”: not offensive in itself but a warning sign of a backwards mindset.
Dupe
Absent any evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to believe that it has nothing to do with Wuhan- all place names are considered problematic including Ebola, Zika, Middle East, etc.- which is why the decision is made and from now on it’s FGMX-27 instead of Chicago Grippe or Toronto Crotch-Rot.
Linked earlier:
Many of the diseases you name were named well before awareness of the stigmatization was an accepted fact. Zika was named after the Ziika Forest, for instance, in 1947. It’s simply too late to change the name; it is already printed in thousands of news articles, medical papers, etc.
Here are the WHO best practices for naming of new human infectious diseases:
Tables A and B may be of particular interest.
For the same reason that the United Negro College Fund and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People haven’t changed their names. If they were named today they would have different names, but it’s too late and not worth the effort to get people to switch to a new name. However, new diseases don’t need to be named with the same mistake.
The difference between the Wuhan Virus and the other geographically-named viruses is that only Wuhan has the power of the Chinese state trying to get the name changed.
Everyone including the major media outlets, was calling it the ‘Wuhan Virus’ just a couple of weeks ago. Then the Chinese government started squawking, and suddenly calling a virus by its geographic origin is ‘problematic’, even though that’s been the standard for well over 100 years.
At the same time, China has been downplaying its role in practices that led to the virus transferring to people, covering up the virus itself, destroying evidence about its origin, and is now trying to rewrite history. You see, China isn’t a corrupt country with terrible health practices that led to a pandemic that they tried to cover up, hut a victim of racism that is magnanimously trying to help the world.
I suggest we call it the ‘Wuhan-Xi’ virus, or the ‘Wuhan-CCP’ virus to punish them for this crap, or perhaps the Wuhan-Pooh virus.
And reporters who waste time in press conferences about a global pandemic to ask questions about ‘problematic’ name choices or other SJW or anti-Trump ‘gotchas’ should be banned from press conferences until this over. Trivialities are for trivial times. When shit gets serious, there is no time to ask about the gender equity on virus response teams or whether the head of a hospital has the correct skin color or gender.
BTW, the World Health Organization is heavily influenced by China, and the WHO’s initial response to the virus downplayed it and basically repeated the Chinese line for some time until reality became unavoidable.
Until five years ago, you mean.
Not true.
Not true.
Not true.
An absolutely reprehensible, vindictive and misguided suggestion.
Here you go. It appears to be deliberate: