Coronavirus Is the Chinese Government’s Curse Upon the World

The World Health Organization and other sensitive souls have instructed us to stop referring to the new strain of the 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 toward 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 the 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 self-critical public letters—a Marxist mainstay—admitting that the warning “had a negative impact.”

The Chinese communists probably let 5 million people leave Wuhan without screening, according to...

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