Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar is under self-quarantine after a man with COVID-19 exposed attendees at CPAC 2020 to the virus, but after Republican politician announced he was among those directly exposed, his use of the term “Wuhan virus” has sparked a heated debate.
Above is Gosar’s controversial tweet, which NBC reports has put the representative under heavy fire. But Gosar isn’t the only one feeling the heat, as the Washington Post reports President Donald Trump and Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are also facing backlash after referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus” and the “Chinese coronavirus.”
While the first reported case of COVID-19 was indeed in Wuhan, China, in February the World Health Organization (WHO) gave the virus its official name and released a statement saying they were careful to find a name that didn’t refer to “a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people,” in order to “to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing.”
Since the official COVID-19 name was given, people are beginning to call the term “Wuhan virus” racist or at the very least problematic, Fox News reports.
A CNN legal analyst, Renato Mariotti, retweeted his response to Gosar’s tweet, saying calling COVID-19 “Wuhan virus” places undue blame on China for the disease.
But others are coming to Gosar’s defense, pointing out that many diseases in the past — Ebola, Zika, West Nile — have also carried area specific names, Newsweek reports.
However, these past viruses were all named before the WHO implemented a new “best practices for naming new human infectious diseases” policy in 2015, the New York Times reports.
“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,” Keiji Fukuda, the Assistant Director-General of the WHO’s department of Health Security, said in 2015 statement. “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.”
New York City business owner Kin Lam recently told CBS that COVID-19 concerns are already crippling Chinatown, and dealing severe damage to Asian-American owned businesses. Jing Fong, the owner of a popular dim sum restaurant in New York City, claims the disease has caused his business to drop by 50%, losing $1.5 million in the past few months.
Jonathan Mok, a 23-year-old man from Singapore, was attacked while studying London. Mok shared with BBC that one of his attackers yelled, “I don’t want your coronavirus in my country” while beating him and fracturing his face.
Gosar is standing by his use of the term, tweeting the following at MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes who responded to his original tweet and called it “astoundingly gross.”
Gosar is correct in stating that many outlets — including the Deseret News — were indeed referring COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus” in early reports. Since its official name change, and the global spread of the virus, those terms have fallen out of fashion.
“There’s no reason to add any fuel to the fire during an outbreak when people are already on edge and inclined to blame the problem on other people,” Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the New York Times.