The Atlantic : Why Trump Intentionally Misnames the Coronavirus [View all]

[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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