By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
The World Health Organization and other sensitive souls
have instructed us to stop referring to the new strain of coronavirus as the
“Wuhan” or “Chinese” flu because of the racist connotations. I’m disinclined to
curb my speech to placate Chinese propagandists — and it seems to me the
aversion to those terms is less about racism than about averting blame. But in
the spirit of comity, and avoiding disparaging an entire nation, I’m happy to
call it the ChiCom Flu moving forward.
There are many traditional naming conventions that don’t
really make that much sense. Somewhat weirdly, for example, we often name
diseases after the people who “discover” them — Hodgkin’s disease after Thomas
Hodgkin, Parkinson’s disease after James Parkinson, and so on.
But naming viral diseases after places — Guinea Worm,
West Nile Virus, Ebola, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, etc. — is probably just
intuitive. Viruses “come” from someplace, after all, and thus people gravitate
to those names. I doubt we came up with “Lyme disease” because of some deep enmity
towards Connecticut.
Anyway, “COVID-19” or “H1N1” don’t exactly roll off the
tongue.
The latter was, until very recently, widely referred to
as the “Spanish flu,” a virus that killed around 675,000 Americans and tens of
millions of others around the world in the early 1900s. “Spanish flu” has now
retroactively fallen into disfavor as well. And to be fair, there is some
historical evidence that the virus may actually have originated in China or
France, so if we must call it the French flu moving forward, so be it.
But while the Spanish have a good case to be annoyed, the
Chinese government does not. As Jim Geraghty notes, the Communist Chinese have
been far more effective in stopping the spread of information about the
coronavirus than in stopping the spread of the coronavirus itself. Today, for
example, China expelled most American journalists from the country.
Early on, the Communists destroyed samples and suppressed
vital information that could have helped mitigate the damage of this new strain
of coronavirus. The government also silenced doctors who warned about the
disease. Some were censured for “spreading rumors” or sharing test results with
colleagues, and some were forced to write a self-critical public letters — a
Marxist mainstay — admitting that the warning “had a negative impact.” The
Chinese Communists probably let five million people leave Wuhan without
screening, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Chinese Communists, like all Communists, hide their
societal problems. There is no crime, disease, or addiction in the collectivist
state. This kind of secrecy and dishonesty can be disastrous, especially in a
highly interconnected world.
Though millions of Chinese have been lifted out of
extreme poverty through free trade, with modernity comes some basic
responsibilities — like, for instance, not killing everyone in the world with
preventable zoonotic diseases.
The Chinese regime is perfectly capable of administering
an array of authoritarian policies to suppress the rights of its own people.
But it’s apparently unable to exert even mild cultural pressure warning them
that their eating habits can be extraordinarily dangerous, and hold the
potential of creating massive socioeconomic problems.
If reports are correct, it was in Wuhan’s popular “wet
markets” that vendors were selling the bats — and possibly snakes — that may
have caused the COVID-19 outbreak. “Wet” because the meat sold in its
unsanitary stalls was only recently slaughtered.
This kind of thing happens quite often. And not always in
China, of course. But the avian influenza was likely transmitted to humans from
chickens in a “wet” market. Scientists have been warning for years that the
eating of exotic animals in southern China “is a time bomb.” Acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS) also originated in China, and probably jumped to humans through
bats. Other coronavirus strains are also likely connected to bats.
I hate to thrust my Western cultural values on anyone,
but maybe it’s time to stop eating bats.
It’s important to stress that it’s not the Chinese people
who are the problem. Just look at their success in Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Singapore, or the United States. The ChiComs are the problem. If the Chinese
government spent as much time working on educating its people and regulating
dangerous markets as it does on secrecy and propaganda efforts, maybe it
wouldn’t have to worry as much about diseases being named after it — or about
the catastrophic death and economic pain their negligence helps cause.
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