Calling the coronavirus the ‘Chinese virus’ matters – research connects the label with racist bias

No one wants their geographic region to be associated with a deadly disease. Unfortunately, this has happened in the past with diseases such as “German measles,” “Spanish flu” and “Asiatic cholera.”

It happens today, too, even though the World Health Organization advises against naming pathogens for places to “minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people.” By Feb. 11, 2020, the WHO had announced that the official name for the novel coronavirus just starting its spread around the world would be severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 – or SARS-CoV-2. The illness it caused would be called COVID-19, short for Coronavirus Disease of 2019

Yet some politicians, conservative journalists and others persisted in calling the COVID-19 virus the “Chinese virus,” or some variant of this term, such as the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” (after the Chinese city that first reported the virus), “Chinese flu” and “Kung flu.”

Yes I remember Obama used to call ISIS by the acronym ISIL.

It was odd that Obama insisted on using those initials rather than ISIS . But he was stubborn about that.

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And I think it was John Kerry and others called it Daesh.

Here’s why - it’s the Islamo name. It’s the anti-colonist name. Obama had to show his respect.

In the Arab world and beyond, the group is referred to by its Arabic-language acronym “Daesh” (alt. Da’esh | Arabic: داعش | pronunc. dah-ESH). The acronym is derived from the group’s extended name: “D” / daal(د) = ad-Dawla, “the state [of]”, “A” / alif(ا) = al-Islamiyya, “Islam”, “E” / ‘ayn(ع) = fi’l- ‘iraq, “in Iraq”, “Sh” / shin(ش) = wa’ash-Sham, “and the Sham (region roughly equivalent to the Levant)”.

Remember how Nancy Pelosi was afraid people would not want to go to Chinatown if we call it the China virus?

And how she told people to keep going about their business?!

Why is it that we are allowed to call historic disease outbreaks such as the Spanish flu or the Hong Kong flu by those names, but somehow Liberals are triggered if we would call covid-19 the China virus or the Wuhan virus?

we didn't have massive trade deficit with them nor had their intelligence folks infiltrated our gubmint.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/01/ohio-state-revokes-arizona-professors-phd-questioning-her-findings-video-games

Ohio State State University took the extraordinary step of revoking a graduate’s doctorate last week. Now her future at the University of Arizona, where she is an assistant professor of communication, is unclear.

Jodi Whitaker’s problems started in 2015, after scholars in two countries noticed irregularities in the data in her 2012 paper on video games. The study in Communication Research, called “’Boom, Headshot!’ Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy,” found that playing a violent video game improved real-life shooting skills. Initially, it was something of a boon for both Whitaker, then still a graduate student at Ohio State, and her co-author and dissertation committee chair, Brad J. Bushman, the Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication there. That’s because Bushman served on President Obama’s committee on gun violence and his research challenges what he calls “myths” about violence, including that violent media have a trivial effect on aggression.

But Patrick Markey, a professor of psychology at Villanova University — whose own findings on video games clash with Bushman’s — soon challenged the paper, along with Malte Elson, a postdoctoral researcher in educational psychology at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Together they alerted a Committee of Initial Inquiry at Ohio State to what they called irregularities in some of the variables of the data set. The values of questioned variables could not be confirmed because the original research records were unavailable, according to Communication Research, which in 2016 decided that a retraction was warranted.

Bushman was cleared of wrongdoing by Ohio State, but he agreed to the retraction. He also agreed to the retraction of another paper in which Whitaker was not involved — one finding that watching violent cartoons inhibits children’s learning — earlier this year, as reported by Retraction Watch. Data on a second, 2016 paper by Whitaker and Bushman (on which Bushman was the lead) also have been corrected; that study found that “catharsis beliefs” attract people to violent video games.

But Whitaker, the 2012 paper’s lead author, was not cleared of wrongdoing. And Ohio State’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to revoke her doctorate, granted in 2013. . .

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