[activeStick]

Originally Posted by Firebot

I'm going to call this out.

Viruses of note have historically been linked to their origin.

We have the british variant, the south africa variant, the brazil variant, the indian variant all named by their first known origin. Each used interchangeably today by the media.

You have viruses identified by their origin as part of their identification like MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).

The 1918 flu is still called the spanish flu today despite being knowingly misidentified.

But Wuhan (or chinese) coronavirus? That is racist.

Now quite obviously, a deadly new virus from a specific region will cause ostracism against people from that region, the main justification for not calling it by origin name.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/28/us/di...rnd/index.html

Even CNN constantly used the term "Wuhan virus", it stopped pretty much as soon as Trump started using it as well as the term "china virus", with CNN needing a moral high ground to stand on. Here's several article "pre-Trump" quote (note their dates, and when Trump did his China virus remark) and they made an article to pat themselves on the back for identifying and fixing their moral compass.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/05/healt...ort/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/22/world...ntl/index.html



A visual guide to the Wuhan coronavirus indeed.

Yet the media, including CNN today despite their justice warrior stance last year, have completely forgotten their moral high ground and have no problem naming the variants by their origin today.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/14/healt...gbr/index.html

Politics has played way too much of a hand with covid. This faux outrage crap needs to be turfed, it was a totally political shift.

The title was perfectly fine...until Trump used the term.

The title was never perfectly fine and just because talking heads in the media used and continue to use it, doesn't mean it's how things should continue.

Here is guidance from WHO on naming viruses:

The use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security, WHO. “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. 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.”

https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-...tious-diseases

Edit: Beaten by Fuzz, though it's a different link