Focus on virus, not blaming China for pandemic
President Donald Trump has taken to describing the novel coronavirus that has led to a worldwide pandemic as the “Chinese virus.”
But his efforts at rebranding are a waste of time and effort that should be directed to the crisis itself. Although the coronavirus in question was first identified last December in China’s Wuhan province, there are risks to labeling it in those terms.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a fellow Republican, learned as much this week.
The senator himself has been referring to SARS-CoV-2 (that’s the official name for the virus) the same way most of us do, as “the coronavirus.” But questioned about the president’s recent rhetoric, Cornyn defended the label.
“China is to blame,” Cornyn said, “because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that, these viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people and that's why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like
SARS, like MERS, the swine flu.”
He misspoke, clearly. For example MERS — Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — was first identified in Saudi Arabia. The swine flu epidemic also did not originate in China, as The Washington Post reported this week, though the strain of coronavirus that led to the 2003 SARS epidemic did. But more importantly, Cornyn’s comments were insensitive, at best, to Asian Americans at a time when the country needs to be pulled together, not further divided.
“It’s this incredible amount of ignorance compounded with racism,” said state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat who represents west Houston.
“This has a direct result on what happens to Asian Americans,” he added. “Whenever Trump talks about a minority group, whenever he disparages them, there is a direct and immediate effect on that group.”
Plus, he added, the push to “rename” the coronavirus does nothing to help our preparedness to fight it. It may even lull the president’s followers into a false sense of security by suggesting that COVID-19 is a disease spreading elsewhere or one that won’t affect them.
“I think for Asian Americans, in particular East Asians, there’s basically been a racial target put on them,” said Hena Rafiq, the Asian American and Pacific Islander constituency organizer for the Texas Democratic Party.
It was upsetting, Rafiq continued, to hear Texas’ senior senator defend Trump, especially when he should be focused on delivering aid to state residents.
“Language is so important,” she added.
And Asian-American Texans are facing their own economic and personal challenges right now without Trump and Cornyn making matters worse. Many, for example, are already seeing their small businesses pummeled due to fears related to the coronavirus.
Others have been grappling with the coronavirus for months and could help their fellow Texans with what they’ve learned from their experiences, said Helen Shih, a medical pharmacist based in Pearland. Her own father, for example, is from Wuhan, and she has 40 relatives still in that province.
Shih, who serves on the board of United Chinese Americans, said leaders of that community have been torn over how to respond to Trump’s remarks. In a conference call Wednesday night, some board members argued there’s no point in asking a bully to temper his tone; others insisted it was worth trying, though, because Trump’s rhetoric has brought anti-Asian discrimination to the surface.
“It’s really not fair to us,” Shih said.
It’s not. The president, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to care about that. At a press conference Thursday, he vigorously defended his use of the label. “It's not racist at all,” said Trump, whose administration has criticized China’s initial lack of transparency about the virus. A photo taken of his prepared remarks showed that the term “Corona” virus had been scratched out and replaced with “Chinese” virus.
But Cornyn should know better. Ironically, Cornyn is one of the few high-ranking Republican officials who was doing outreach to Asian-American voters even before the GOP realized it desperately needs to diversify its electoral coalition in Texas. During his 2014 reelection campaign, he produced campaign materials in Mandarin and Vietnamese, as well as English and Spanish.
Cornyn, a who faces reelection this year against the ultimate Democratic nominee, either MJ Hegar or state Sen. Royce West, seemed to realize that his comments Wednesday were inartful at best. He told a Dallas TV news station that his criticism was of China’s leaders, not its people, much less Chinese-Americans.
“I will just say simply that it’s a fact that this virus emanated from China,” Cornyn said. “That’s not a problem with the Chinese people, that’s a problem caused by the Chinese Communist Party, and the sort of closed society they have where they are embarrassed by this epidemic — this pandemic — and they are trying to scapegoat other people when, in fact, they are the reason this has happened.”
Some would say Trump and Republicans are doing the scapegoating. Although experts say Trump’s move to limit air travel from China earlier this year was prudent, the administration faces serious questions about its preparedness for the crisis, including a potentially disastrous lag in available testing. Dwelling on where the virus originated serves no productive purpose.
“The geographic location is really irrelevant,” said Joseph Petrosino, chairman and professor of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “There are viruses all over the world and viruses emerge from different parts of the world all the time.”
Since viruses come from animals, he continued, they may be more likely to emerge in places with notable biodiversity, such as the rain forests of South America. Infectious diseases of all sorts more easily spread in densely populated parts of the world.
Scientists, Petrosino explained, are keen to identify the animal that passes a virus to humans; that tells scientists something about the virus’s genome. Researchers think this coronavirus came from bats or pangolins — “scaly, anteaterlooking things.”
Still, to refer to a virus by the place where it was first identified — as was once conventional for flu outbreaks — provides no useful information, from a scientific perspective.
Petrosino said, “The virology world has moved beyond that.”
So should the president and his supporters in the midst of a public health crisis.