The Atlantic : Why Trump Intentionally Misnames the Coronavirus

[Celerity]

When conservative figures continually refer to the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus,” it’s clear they’re doing it to make a point. When it comes to the popular naming of infectious diseases, xenophobia has long played a prominent role.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/why-trump-intentionally-misnames-coronavirus/607900/

In President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address yesterday about the threats of the novel coronavirus, he went out of his way to label it a “foreign virus.” “This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” Trump said, in words that betrayed the isolationist leanings of his chief speechwriter, Stephen Miller. The speech took a typically Miller-esque approach to the coronavirus pandemic: Blame foreigners, and close up U.S. borders.

The “foreign virus” line drew immediate criticism, including from CNN’s Jim Acosta, who told Chris Cuomo following the address, “I think it is going to come across to a lot of Americans as smacking of xenophobia to use that kind of term in this speech.” This comes on the heels of a number of Republican politicians, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, making a point of referring to the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus.” The World Health Organization, in officially giving the disease caused by the virus the name COVID-19, sought to avoid just this type of geographic stigmatization.

When it comes to the popular naming of infectious diseases, xenophobia has long played a prominent role. Susan Sontag, in her 1988 work, AIDS and Its Metaphors (a follow-up to her extended essay from a decade earlier, Illness as Metaphor), observed that “there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien.”

Syphilis, which ravaged Europe beginning in the late 15th century, is a famous case of what Sontag calls “the need to make a dreaded disease foreign.” “It was the ‘French pox’ to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese,” she wrote. (The name “syphilis” originated in an epic Latin poem written in 1530 by the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro, about a shepherd boy named Syphilis cursed with the disease by the god Apollo. The poem was called Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus, “Syphilis or the French Disease.”)

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[guillaumeb]

1. Syphillis was called "the English disease" in France. eom

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. Kluxers And Grifters weaponize differences ...

[Laelth]

3. The Spanish Flu?

Yes. This is a typical rhetorical/political pattern.

-Laelth

[mjvpi]

4. That's the1918 pandemic?

And it actually originated in the American heartland, I believe.

[Wednesdays]

5. That's a misconception.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

[mjvpi]

7. Thanks. I had just finished reading that they don't know exactly.

[GulfCoast66]

10. I have read it was first reported in the Spanish Press because they were not in WWI.

So unlike the US and the rest of the world were not censoring their press. So the first it was read about was in the Spanish press.

I’ve never read xenophobia was behind the name.

But I’m an Agricultural manager. I could well be wrong.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Brucellosis: aka Gibraltar, Cyprus, Neapolitan, Italian, Crimean and Malta fever

or just 'Mediterranean fever'. Or undulant fever.

https://www.bmj.com/content/329/7460/272

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brucellosis

[BigmanPigman]

8. I noticed Fux News doing this BS a lot last night

during Tucker Carlson. For the most part he was non partisan but when he brought this up I got really angry. That is why I can't watch that shit.

[Pepsidog]

9. All Dems should call it "The Trump Virus' or the "Trump Pandemic".

Last edited Thu Mar 12, 2020, 11:15 PM - Edit history (1)

[SCantiGOP]

11. Actually, that might be a reason

The day before Trump’s speech where he referenced the “foreign virus” I had seen that “Trump virus” has been trending on Twitter. I bet he knew that and was trying to head off any criticism of his genius self.

Trump Slump referring to the stock market crash is also trending.

[Pepsidog]

13. Let's hope it sticks to him.

[rickyhall]

12. I remember the Hong Kong flu.