- unsupported claim about Macron unpopularity; he certainly was unpopular, to the point of riots, but the coronavirus response seems to have improved his popularity.
Doubt that's the only reason. Standing up for Amazon in such a way probably earned the most.
Wuhan virus topic is interesting. A lot of people like the idea of naming a virus or linking it to the first reported case. It make sense the new name they picked (covid2019) includes 2019 to indicate the year. Using facts like the year or place of first discovery I think makes sense.
The racist angle only applies to some locations that are associated with nationalities. And only in nation states. The problem is more with nation states that we associate land with a single nationality. If the virus started in a multicultural society that angle wouldn't apply.
That only works in a limited scope. If a country didn't report any cases and another country discovers it and finds people coming over with it they will trace it back. The country loses trust and gets labelled as untrustworthy.
That's kinda what happened with China. They covered up / downplayed and played with rules around defining whether a test counts. The WHO helped surpress this. Now the WHO has lost respect (and financing). China has lost face.
History also demonstrates naming diseases by country is a very inaccurate way to name a disease.
Spanish flu didn't start in Spain. There was a war on, and the countries that already had raging infections running through the trenches had suppressed news of those infections to the public as part of regular propaganda operations. Spain was a neutral party to WWI and so lacked the propaganda-driven media clampdown, and is therefore the first nation in the European world to have reported the disease. But the name has stuck, and to this day people assume Spainsh flu originated in Spain.
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation!
To clarify I don't work for Amazon nor related to them in any way. The situation just seemed unfair to me ...
Here is part of the reason that the WHO decided to stop naming viruses that way:
> “In recent years, several new human infectious diseases have emerged. 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.”
SARS did not have a regional name, and it did not stop ignorant racist behaviour against people who appeared to be ethnically Chinese, even in a multicultural city like Toronto, Canada, which was hit hard by SARS. And keep in mind that this was before racism was amplified by social media.
Honestly, ignorant racists are going to continue to be the same, irrespective of the virus naming. IMO, anyone who thinks that people with racist tendencies won't blame Asians for SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 because of non-regional naming is delusional.
As someone who is ethnically Chinese but not from China, it's obviously a nuanced situation. I have mixed feelings about the geographic naming. I can see and appreciate both sides of the argument.
One advantage of using neutral names is that when somebody deliberately uses the wrong name, their political motivations become very clear.
And it may be a matter of degree too; calling something "swine flu" versus H7N5 (or whatever) might result in increased negative associations for the industry, even if the industry can measure effects both ways. I start with industry because there are clear measurements (revenue). For racism, where we have few quantitative measures that we can trust without doing in depth studies, it may be harder to see the effects of better naming policy, and the experience of individuals affected is still the same. Also, a lot of the way that racism works is terrorism, and whether there are 6 people terrorizing or 24 people terrorizing, the effects are going to be fairly similar.
If the virus was called [Geographic Origin Optional] Wildlife Wet Market Coronavirus, and that naming caused the permanent banning of wildlife wet markets worldwide, I think I'd be all for it.
- unsupported claim about Macron unpopularity; he certainly was unpopular, to the point of riots, but the coronavirus response seems to have improved his popularity.