On the morning of March 11, US author Kurt Eichenwald tweeted

As I said, @ GOPLeader – and other GOPrs – were told in a political consultants memo to start using name “Chinese Virus” as part of some stupid political strategy.



Everyone: Go to McCarthy’s twitter feed and ask “How can we trust GOP when you dont even know the disease’s name? — Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) March 11, 2020

And just as expected, over the next few days government officials and politicians, including the respected President of the United States, started using the term “Chinese Virus”.

This usage is against the new naming convention released by the WHO in 2015.

Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security at WHO said in 2015 regarding the new naming convention, “We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”

In the US, such racist stigma has already caused much harm and violence. Just recently, several members of an Asian family were stabbed in Texas because of coronavirus fears.

Unfortunately, the political strategy has succeeded. Instead of talking about how absolutely incompetent the US response has been, the talking point has been shifted to Americans fighting over whether its right to call it Chinese Virus, with one side saying it stigmatises innocent Asians and instigates hate crime, and the other claiming its a liberal PC agenda.

This, coupled with the spread of fake news regarding how China “covered it up for weeks”, (which I wrote about here) has successfully diverted anger away from the US government and shifted the blame to China.

For good measure, a recap of the US’s incompetence here: https://asia-review.com/675/listed-the-uss-atrocious-response-to-the-virus/