A Virus by Any Other Name - Part 1

I don't know exactly how to start this post. Right now it's a complicated thought in my head, and it's itching to spring in a million directions at once, but I think this is the crux of it: Right now progressives don't quite know how to think of China, but the view is evolving. I expect there to be a lot of positives and negatives to take out of each step of that journey.

Unfortunately, I think I'm going to have to break this one up again, and maybe come back to it a few times. It starts out with what has become an almost tired fact in my reading. Yes, viruses are normally named after the places where they originate. Sometimes they are named after the person who discovers them, although that seems to be a dying practice. The Spanish flu is an oft quoted example that was not from Spain, but was something of a racial epithet at the time. Nonetheless, when a novel coronavirus arose in the middle East in 2012 at the height of PC concerns about islamophobia, the virus was named MERS-CoV, for Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus. This name was adopted by the WHO, the same group who is labelling the current coronavirus SARS-CoV2, and the accompanying disease COVID-19.

If you're wondering what the problem is here (and I doubt you are) it's that commentators on the political right, and Donald Trump particularly is very frustrated that the current coronavirus was not given a name geographically linking it to the country of China. Clearly, as other viruses are named after locations and this one isn't, I agree with Donald that this is a Chinese conspiracy to deflect blame, and no multinational cooperation should take place until this critical error is rectified. I would, anyway, if I either had the intelligence of a gnat or somehow didn't see this deed of those American's president for the odious power grab that it is. Donald Trump's reaction to this crisis has been almost laughably bad, and it has crashed the economy which was probably his best argument for being reelected. I think Donald has repeatedly shown himself capable of racial animus to this extent and I have no reason not to think this is largely a cause.

Here's where I want to switch to racism in China, but I don't think this is the place. More important is the fact that no conspiracy is worth its salt if it doesn't have a splash of truth, and here I honestly can't say how much sway China has over the WHO. At the very least, if they want to avoid these attacks, they would be wise to not allow this to happen with any great frequency. The full background to this video is something you would have to look into yourself, but it's shocking enough that it needs to be shared widely.