The Chinese cover-up and the problem with social media

Facebook is a mixed blessing. Through it, I've reconnected with friends from grammar school, high school, college, seminary, and even with family members I haven't seen for half a century or have never met in person at all. It has occupied probably too large a chunk of my spare time for far too long.

I enjoy the social contact. But there is a downside. I've lost friends through Facebook, too. Just now, one of them "snoozed" me- unfriended me for a month for suggesting that maybe, especially since nobody actually uses the term COVID-19 except in formal situations or in medical circles, "Wuhan" might be a better choice.

As things are, nearly everyone continues informally to use the inaccurate term "Coronavirus" (not the name of the sickness, or even of the organism that causes it, but instead a family of viruses including one of those which cause the common cold; that's how Rush Limbaugh managed to do all sorts of damage with his absurd claim that the new virus was the common cold). Ebola was named after the Ebola River in Africa, near which it was first discovered; Marburg, which probably originated in a cave in Africa, was named after the city where it was first identified. Rift Valley Fever, on the other hand, originated in- drumroll- Africa's Rift Valley.

Are Germans and especially Africans, who have had it happen to them over and over, less worthy of protection from the negligible chance that the name of a particular location in a country being used in naming a virus discovered there will result in an entire ethnicity being blamed for it than are the Chinese? Are black folks really that immune from the racism of others? Really? Might at least part of the reason for the double standard not be that none of those diseases became global pandemics because of the negligence of a regime now working furiously to avoid accountability for causing a worldwide pandemic? Hmmm?

We've had two strains of influenza commonly called "the Swine Flu" in my lifetime, and two called "the Bird Flu." At least two strains of influenza designated H1N1 have reached epidemic status, one of them the infamous "Spanish Flu" which killed so many at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The other is the one President Trump is bizarrely and hypocritically criticizing President Obama for allegedly having mishandled.

So far we've had only one HIV and one AIDS, the syndrome the HIV produces. Of course, comparatively few people ever refer in everyday speech to "HIV;" it's generally "the AIDS virus."

The trend in modern times has been for the popular names for widespread contagious diseases to be either recycled or confused with the organism that causes them. Where this has been avoided, it's generally happened through the mechanism of simply naming the particular strain after the place, not necessarily where it originated, but where it was first identified. Does anybody who is not an epidemiologist even know the technical name for what everyone generally calls "the Ebola virus," despite separate names and genetic identities for each of several different strains? On the other hand, who calls it "the Filovirus?"

COVID-19, though, is not popularly known as Wuhan, nor SARS-CoV-2 as the Wuhan Virus. Other than in somewhat formal writing and in medical circles, nobody calls the syndrome COVID-19, and very few people have even heard of SARS-CoV-2.  Both the sickness and the organism which causes it are both usually called "the Coronavirus."  It's the Swine Flu and the Bird Flu and H1N1 all over again.

I can understand the problem with calling the bug "the Chinese virus," as President Trump is wont to do. I can see the danger of the name being the occasion for idiots somehow blaming, and victimizing, people of Chinese origin or descent. But I find it incredible that anyone thinks that such a thing would result from giving it the obvious, natural name, one which would be specific and avoid all confusion, and yet be popular enough to be generally used.

Why not informally call this the Wuhan Virus and the sickness Wuhan? Everybody knows that it originated in China, after all, no matter what it's called- and I wonder how many people know specifically that Wuhan is even in China? And I am certain that nearly all of those who do first heard of it because of the virus. The notion that following the convention of using the location where a virus was identified and calling it "the Wuhan virus" and the sickness "Wuhan disease" for popular purposes would have resulted in outbursts of racism against people of Chinese descent in the West strikes me as ludicrous. And in popular usage, the current outbreak is more likely to be called "Coronavirus" than "COVID-19" anyway. Other than in medical circles- and only then formally- does anybody call the virus itself "SARS-CoV-2."

What difference does it make? Why not let people still call both the sickness and the virus that causes it "coronavirus?" Because something else is going on here, and while I'm not accusing anyone of consciously avoiding the term "Wuhan" to protect the Chinese government from its responsibility for the current pandemic, the Chinese government is trying very, very hard to avoid that responsibility.

We know enough about what happened in the early days of the outbreak to understand that two things took place, both of which are typical of authoritarian regimes. First, the Chinese government knew about the problem long before they are willing to admit. And it did everything in its power to suppress the news.

Ordinary citizens of Wuhan said nothing in the early days of the outbreak. They were afraid to. People who tried to raise the alarm about the outbreak were arrested, imprisoned, or simply "disappeared." Doctors who attempted to accurately portray conditions were censored. The WHO and other international agencies were deceived. A study out of the University of Southampton suggests that prompt and appropriate non-pharmaceutical action by the Chinese government could have reduced the number of cases by 95 percent!

Let that sink in for a moment. If the Chinese government had confronted the outbreak head-on at the outset and had not been more concerned about China's international image than about the welfare of its own people, the current pandemic would not be taking place at all.

To be blunt, the blame for the global pandemic we are currently experiencing lies entirely at the feet of the Chinese government. It must not be allowed to escape accountability.

But the Chinese government is engaged in an active campaign to do precisely that. The cover-up has been both ongoing and massive. At least one Chinese propaganda site operating out of Canada is actually trying to create the impression that the virus originated in the United States!

Despite irresponsibly trying to minimize the dangers of the virus and creating a narrative on the extreme right that it was no big deal, President Trump is playing his habitual Orwellian game of trying to re-write history by saying now that he'd known how bad the virus was for a very long time. and shouldn't be blamed for emphatically denying its severity and downplaying the danger  He, too, needs to be held accountable for his negligence in letting things get to the point they did in the United States. But even Mr. Trump's State Department has noticed the absurd attempt by the Chinese to evade its responsibility for the pandemic by shifting it to the United States, and Secretary Pompeo quite rightly is having no part of it.

You can view an excellent, brief video fro the New York Times on the Chinese government's attempts at damage control here.

Someone has compared an authoritarian state to a body in which there has been nerve damage. An injury may be severe, but appropriate action can't be taken if there is no pain because the brain doesn't notice that anything is wrong. And where the nerve damage is self-inflicted, it isn't the nerves themselves that are at fault. When a government deliberately sticks its head in the sand and is in denial about a problem for long enough that the problem becomes unmanageable, that government has nobody to blame but itself.

And then came the next step: elaborate attempts by the regime to avoid as much propaganda damage as possible once the problem was finally acknowledged. The usual pattern was followed: since the fact of the illness could no longer be concealed, determined efforts were made to make it appear less severe than it really was. And needless to say, attempts were made by the government- as is usually the case in China and other authoritarian societies- to avoid having to take responsibility for the negligence which came from failing to heed the warnings and act to mitigate the problem before it became too big to ignore. It's a stereotyped pattern that is followed over and over and over in authoritarian regimes, and it's been followed more than once before in China. This time, it has resulted in a wholly preventable global pandemic. And once again, the Chinese oligarchy must be held accountable.

But back to Facebook.

It's reasonable not to call this "the Chinese virus," even though it originated in China. But even the name "Wuhan" was passed by when it came to giving this scourge an official name. Officially, it's COVID-19. Except that unofficially, everybody calls it "the Coronavirus," as if there were only one.

It's imprecise, sure. But that's not the end of the world. At the same time, though, I pointed out that as often is the case, taking political correctness to ridiculous extremes is having an unforeseen and unintended side-effect here.

I have to admit that at first, I didn't see the dangers of calling a virus that did, in fact, originate in China "the Chinese virus." Those who engaged me on the subject quickly convinced me that I was wrong. I concede that even trying to drive home the actual origin of the virus in the face of a concerted effort by the Chinese government to deny that indisputable fact doesn't justify the danger that morons would seize upon too blatant a labeling of the virus as "Chinese" as an excuse to abuse those of Chinese origin.

But I continued to question whether using the name "Wuhan" would have the same effect, and whether being so reflexively fearful of what I see as a very low probability that doing so might cause abuse of Chinese-Americans or the blaming of all Chinese for the criminal negligence of their government is not, in fact, playing into the hands of those directly responsible for the very fact that this pandemic is even happening and assisting them in their quite determined effort to avoid accountability for it.

A Facebook friend I respect deeply abruptly threatened to "snooze" me if I said anything more, pointing out- correctly- that the official name of the syndrome is "COVID-19." I said that I had thought better of him, and asked how many people actually called it "COVID-19." He promptly unfriended me, in effect putting me in his personal "Facebook jail" and expressing the patronizing hope that he would "see me again" in a month.

I'm not big on silencing people as a substitute for engaging their ideas and have always said that if Facebook ever suspended my account for anything other than very good reasons- reasons such as I would never give it- that would be the end of my experience with Facebook. Whether it's done by a website or by an individual, being put on "time out" is disrespectful and demeaning, especially as an alternative to even rudimentary attempts to resolve the disagreement that caused it. With regret but without hesitation, I blocked that individual, to make the point that I am unwilling to be treated like a naughty child and thus declined to be available when my "sentence" was over so that he could ask me to promise to be a good boy. I remain open to renewing the relationship, but not without a serious talk between equals about how one goes about dealing courteously and respectfully with honest disagreements.

Only after I did that did a final post from him appear explaining the reason for his sensitivity. It is understandable and even commendable, but I wish he'd explained it before behaving so high-handedly.

This isn't the first time that social media have interfered with my relationships with people I like and respect. Some of those I hold in high personal regard have extreme, bizarre political views concerning which they are very adamant, and are sometimes unwilling forebear discussing certain topics with me (interestingly, I'd always gotten the impression that this particular gentleman was on more or less the same page with me, and had we discussed things further I'm confident that we would have discovered that we disagreed about very little in this case). And to be fair, it's only with difficulty that I can let things go when I've been "triggered," as the popular expression goes. That's my own personal failing, and I accept complete responsibility for it.

As things are, I have taken to using my Twitter account pretty much only to post entries from this blog and my other one. If anything, Twitter is even less amenable to calm, rational discussion than Facebook is.

Anyway, I've decided to take a break from Facebook while a contemplate whether it does more good or more harm. I'll have to think about whether despite what it will cost me to leave it permanently, it's really worth this sort of thing.

But in any case, I remain adamant about what for me was the whole point: as valid and important it is to protect those of Chinese background from racist harassment or, absurdly, the blame which should be borne by the criminally negligent Chinese government alone, it's also important that the thuggish, incompetent Chinese oligarchy not be allowed to evade its responsibility for a global pandemic.

A commendable desire to prevent the first danger should not cause us to go so far overboard in the preventative measures we take as to help to bring the second about. After all, a lot of Chinese people, as well as people from almost every ethnicity on the planet, have and will continue to die so that the Chinese regime can save face.

ADDENDUM: Here's an article from Vital Interests on the PRC disinformation campaign. Worth a look.

ADDENDUM II: Apparently under pressure from its own people, the Chinese government has rehabilitated the doctor who tried to raise the alarm about it, was silenced and threatened with arrest, and finally died of the disease.

Nice of it. But the world still needs to hold it accountable for a global tragedy for which it is absolutely and completely culpable, and I cannot help but wonder about the degree to which politically correct attempts to separate China from any association with the pandemic- as inherently absurd as they are- in the name of countering racist idiocy is not having the wholly unintended side-effect of Bejing to avoid that accountability.