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by awerawerawrjhui 2064 days ago
> the use of racist terms like “China virus” has also grown

I will convert to Scientology before I accept that it's "racist" to refer to a disease by its place of geographical origin.

2 comments

Are you Chinese or visibly East Asian?

It’s easy to say this until you’ve had someone yell this at you on the street in order to harass you.

Just call it something else. It’s not that hard. There are lots of diseases from lots of other places that we somehow manage to refer to without tying it to the place from which it originated, or from which people think it originated.

It's a stupid term. Why would you choose this unspecific, uninformative name for a virus instead of its actual name? Hmm...
Because had the Chinese government acknowledged the Wuhan outbreak early, and done a local lockdown instead of trying to shove it under the rug, there would be no pandemic. Quite a reason to be pissed off at it (mind you, specific government and not an abstract "race").
Spanish Flu?

Though yes, it's a stupid name (Wuhan Virus would be "ok-ish" in my opinion though - if we didn't know which virus it was)

Spanish Flu

Hong Kong Flu

West Nile Virus

German Measles

Guinea Worm

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever

Lyme Disease (named after Lyme, Connecticut)

Ross River Fever

Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever (named after Omsk, Russia)

Ebola (named after the Ebola River)

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome

Zika (named after the Zika Forest, Uganda)

Japanese Encephalitis

Marburg Virus Disease (named after Marburg, Germany)

You will notice that most of those names don't come from people living in that place and frequently those diseases were actively named to denigrate the locals.

Or they're not named in recent times, but instead in times when using slurs was a leisure activity.

Plus the egregious case of the "Spanish" flu that might have originated in the US but Spain was unlucky to be talking openly about it.

“Wuhan Virus” for example conveys information not apparent when calling it a coronavirus.