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If Saying ‘Wuhan Coronavirus’ Is Racist…
…Then what do you say about these diseases:
- California Serogroup Viruses / California Encephalitis
- Colorado Tick Fever
- Coxsackievirus (for the NY town)
- Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever
- Ebola virus (named for the Ebola River)
- Hantavirus (named for the Hantan River)
- Japanese Encephalitis
- Junin Virus (named for the Argentine city)
- Kyasanur Forest Virus
- Lassa Fever (named for a village in Nigeria)
- Lyme Disease (named for Lyme, CT)
- Machupo Virus (named for the Machupo River)
- Marburg Virus (named for a German town)
- Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS – this is also a coronavirus)
- Murray Valley Encephalitis (area in Australia)
- Nipah Virus (area in Malaysia)
- Norwalk Virus, aka norovirus (named for Norwalk, OH)
- Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever (named for a Russian city)
- Powassan Encephalitis (named for an Ontario city)
- Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
- Ross River Virus (river in Australia)
- Semliki Forest Virus (in Uganda)
- St. Louis Encephalitis
- Tularemia (named for Tulare County, CA)
- Venezuela Equine Encephalitis
- West Nile Virus (de Nile is a river in Egypt)
- Zika virus (named for the Zika Forest)
This is just the pathogens off the Pathogen Safety Data Sheets. This is so intensely stupid it leaves me staring in disbelief. Is this OrangeManBad or Chinese cash at work, or are they all just huffing paint?
Published in Journalism
Whether this is ignorance or corruption makes little difference; these people cannot be trusted.
The Chinese have worked tirelessly on this. With help from their minions in Big Tech and media.
and
First Point Of Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Action Plan Is To Stop “Racism”
“Stop the political theater and willful misinformation that has heightened confusion and discrimination,” states the plan, adding that “This communication is essential to combating the dangerous epidemic of fear, chaos, and stigmatization that can overtake communities faster than the virus.”
“Acts of racism and xenophobia against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community must not be tolerated,” according to the plan.
Exhibit 5229 of why this senile fool should not be president.
None of the above. The diseases you have listed above were named before “wokeism” replaced rational thought in much of American society.
I find the concern about racism concerning the Chinese touching (in an ironic way) since within China Chinese society is quite stratified based on a person’s tribal lineage.
Biden’s “plan” is to spout leftist platitudes and condemn all of the concrete steps that President Trump has taken that actually combat the virus. Eventually some people will start to listen to what Biden says and evaluate him as an actual candidate, rather than just the anti-Bernie. That will be a bad day for Biden. Hillary is hoping that it happens before the convention.
I can’t hear you while I’m in the middle of my Mini Myer’s cocktail of 25 grams IV Vitamin C and smaller amounts of Zinc, Magnesium Sulfate, B Vitamins and Selenium but I am confident that CNN levels of stupidity are airborne pathogens that come out of the tv screen and attack your brain especially if you’re within 25 feet of an airport LED screen for more than 5 minutes. One other theory is they’re a tapeworm that crawls in through your ear and infects your brain rendering you very susceptible to the power of suggestion.
Is this to include not discriminating against them for enrollment in top-level schools, or is that a matriculation too far?
They remind me of the scene in “The Office” when Michael Scott asks Oscar whether he prefers a different term than “Mexican” to describe his family’s origins.
What you mean you Gweilo?
It’s the media’s general immediate gratification system at work, in that they are so impatient to get Trump out of office, they have no concern for either logic or intellectual consistency between what they’re saying now, and what they might have said a week, month or year ago.
So any opening they see as ‘getting’ Trump and/or his supporters is trotted out and hyperventilated over, based on the idea that their core progressive viewers will lap it up, and swing voters won’t remember they were saying something totally different a short time ago — as is the case here, where the networks and news outlets were freely using ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ until someone decided they could weaponize the using of the geographical indicator of the virus’ origination point. You saw a variation of that with the air travel bans — the same people derided Trump for putting the original travel ban to and from China in last month, then complained over the last few weeks that Trump wasn’t doing enough to stop the spread of coronavirus, then this week derided Trump for his air travel ban from Europe, to prevent the easier spread of coronavirus from Italy to America.
They really think voters who don’t follow politics closely will be fooled by that, but even those people notice when the media flips on a dime overnight because they can’t avoid pushing the “Trump is Always Wrong” narrative, and when he makes a policy adjustment, they have to react in the opposite direction in Pavlovian fashion.
(This phenomenon will also rear its ugly head in a little while, when the media starts blaming Trump for so many things being shut down, even though they were the ones leading the charge to shut down so many things because of the virus.)
To find out, last night I huffed some paint. At around 2:00, I became convinced that, although 26 of these 27 instances were not racist, Norwalk Virus, named for Norwalk, OH, is.
The reason will shock you.
It turns out that originally, Norwalk Virus was not racist at all. It referred to Norwalk, Connecticut, not Norwalk OH. It was named by a respected epidemiologist, Edmund “Fast Eddy” Fleenbargle, a native of rival Stanford, CT, who was studying the epidemic. He found evidence that the virus was being spread by Norwalk people who worked in the Packaging area of Norwalk manufacturing plants; they would deliberately lick the packing tape, seal the package, and send the products on for shipping by Amazon. (Tip: If your order of Norwalk products is over $20.00, you get free shipping!)
So there was no racism involved. As a scientist, Fleenbargle knew that people of Norwalk stock have an inborn, evil desire to conquer the world, and the virus was simply a conspiracy to achieve that end.
The racism came when people of Norwalk, CT, spread the rumor that the virus originated in Norwalk, Ohio. If you know anyone from my state of Ohio, you know that they would never do such a thing, and note that we also don’t have a racist bone in our body, being descended from the Lost Tribe of Paramus, NJ, which you can tell by the shape of our eyes and to a lesser extent our ear cartilage, both of which convey a sense of inborn honesty and fairmindedness.
Since I woke up, with a bad headache, I am not feeling as confident about this answer, but I did write it all down on the bedroom wall last night with a bold Sharpie pen, so I though I should pass it on.
This isn’t a Trump-era phenomenon, the same thing happened with the swine flu in 2010/11.
As some might recall, the virus was initially termed the “Mexican flu” in the press since the first publicized outbreaks were in Mexico or triggered by patients from Mexico. But that was considered politically incorrect against Mexico and there was also a fear that people might become overly suspicious of travel to Mexico or interacting with Mexicans even after the virus was much more heavily established in the US.
But the next most-popular name in the press was “swine flu”, which was also less than desirable because it might lead the unsuspecting into thinking they could get it from pigs or pork, which was not the case. So in the end, “they” chose “vH1N1”, which was possibly the worst name of all: 1) it’s difficult to remember and not catchy; 2) H1N1 is the largest category of known human influenza viruses; by putting “H1N1” in the name of the pandemic virus, many people were confused as to whether the H1N1 component of their seasonal flu shot protected them from the new strain (it did not).
I understand the desire not to tarnish a location based on a matter of happenstance. But in some cases it’s better than the alternatives. Covid-19 actually isn’t that bad of a name – it’s easy to remember and spell, and most importantly is unique enough that everyone knows exactly which virus/disease you’re talking about.
In any case, it’s better than just taking random first names the way we do with hurricanes.
Great list, but also missing the most obvious one: the Spanish flu. And yes, I know why that’s not on the list.
German measles too.
The Chicoms are saying it was an American soldier who brought it to China 🇨🇳. You won’t hear Biden condemning this as racist. Too far into their pockets.
They aren’t completely random. They now alternate between male and female. They used to be all female, but that was sexist.
Yes, and a black congress critter, Sheila Jackson Lee, thinks hurricane names are too “lily-white” and are therefore racist.
They only started naming hurricanes after men when some women complained because only naming them after women was sexist.
Now it’s worse than sexist; all the non-female names chosen are dead-naming a transperson.
This might be worthy of its own conversation, but why are the Han Chinese so thin skinned? From on line comments I read, it’s not just their leadership but rather it seems universal among the populace.
Someone on social media was calling it the WuFlu, in fun. I thought that was cute.
You forgot the Osaka flu that hit Springfield a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqCVB0tOSVQ
You forgot Montezuma’s Revenge. :)
Pink eye is so common in Chennai (Madras) India, that Southern Indians call it “Madras Eye”
You missed an opportunity there– The Nile Is Not Just A River In Egypt.
I applaud your sense of decorum. We don’t say such things in main feed posts…
A scan of any list of disease names reveals the tendency of unsophisticated people to blame their problems on Rivers, simply because they are “different”.
It is tempting to single out humans for this deplorable tendency, but it’s likely that some Rivers use equally hurtful slurs to refer to various ethnic groups of people.
What, collusion with a foreign government to influence an election?