The World Health Organization and the media are worried about a contagion. You’ll be surprised about which contagion. “The coronavirus outbreak has sparked what the World Health Organization is calling an ‘infodemic’ — an overwhelming amount of information on social media and websites,” reports NPR. Axios writes that fear “‘combined with increased social media savvy has created an ‘infodemic,’ according to WHO’s director-general.” The BBC: “The WHO has labeled the spread of fake news on the outbreak an ‘infodemic.'”
It’s a weird word, “infodemic.” “Demos” is Greek for people. “Epi-” is Greek for around, and “pan-“ is Greek for all or everywhere. So epidemic means a disease that has gotten around a population, and pandemic means a disease that has gotten everywhere. Infodemic doesn’t really work, then. It means info has gotten to a population or something — if we’re being a bit literal.
Now, it’s not that there’s no irresponsible way to report about a health crisis, and the panic about COVID-19 may really pose a more significant threat than the epidemic itself. But it’s odd to see journalists diagnose the flow of information as a problem using a cutesy coinage. And this sure is an interesting neologism for WHO to be spreading as it conspicuously sucks up to an authoritarian government that is not exactly known for its love of the free flow of information. On Jan. 29, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “was lavish in his praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials for their commitment to transparency during their ‘very candid discussions’ in Beijing” over the response to the outbreak, per Reuters. In the same article, we find WHO acting as though the real issue is outside China.
But that was back in January — when the media was treating the disease as though the primary threat it posed was the contaminant of racism. As Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote in a Salon article titled “‘Wuhan coronavirus’ and the racist art of naming a virus,” when a virus starts “in a country that Americans have stereotypes towards, naming it after that region — as with Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Asian Flu, and now, Wuhan Coronavirus — is a great way to play on xenophobic and racist tropes.”
Yes, that means that white supremacy can be a factor even in the way that we name viruses.
There’s a Shakespeare line questioning what’s in a name that Lee should consult. Our culture’s obsession with controlling words has now infected how we think about containing and responding to the spread of diseases since it has infected everything. Among Lee’s concerns is that the species we consider invasive tend to be Asian, which must be a matter of racism. It couldn’t be that Asia merely is across a wider ocean than Africa and Europe, and therefore its native species can be more damaging when introduced to nonnative North American biomes. No, no, it’s a word thing: “On the U.S. Department of the Interior’s list of invasive species, the most common demonym on the list are those that note Asian origin.”
As an epidemic threatens to go pandemic and the media warns about an infodemic, perhaps our cultural problem is not that authoritative gatekeepers have too little control over published information — but too much.
