Few entities have behaved worse during the COVID-19 pandemic than the World Health Organization, which has spent the entire crisis covering for the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet American news media keep citing the United Nations health group as the chief authority on whether it is wrong for President Trump and his allies to refer to the virus as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan coronavirus.”
Never mind that WHO, which is conspicuously deferential to China, is supposed to be in the business of international public health, not policing language and playing at geopolitics. And never mind that WHO’s campaign to rebrand the virus coincides perfectly with China’s efforts to rewrite the history of the pandemic that started within its borders. There are Republican lawmakers to scold!
“The WHO said to stop calling it ‘Chinese’ coronavirus, but Republicans didn’t listen,” reads the headline to an Axios report published this week.
Meanwhile, Vox quotes the head of WHO, who explains the organization came up with “COVID-19” in February because it “had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual, or a group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease.”
Yet another WHO employee said recently in a CNBC report, “Viruses know no borders, and they don’t care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin, or how much money you have in the bank. So it’s really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus.”
A couple of issues:
First, many people still call it the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan coronavirus” because that is how the disease was branded in the beginning by the news media that now say it is racist to use those terms.
Second, it should not be ignored that WHO’s push to get people to stop referring to the virus by its country of origin comes amid China’s effort to win the COVID-19 narrative. It is impossible to ignore the eagerness with which employees of China’s state-run media have promoted WHO’s war for terminology.
Third, it is not WHO’s place to tell people they cannot refer to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan coronavirus.” How people talk or whether it hurts China’s standing is, frankly, none of WHO’s business.
Moreover, even if language and geopolitics did fall under WHO’s purview, it is the last organization that anyone should be taking cues from regarding how we talk about a disaster exasperated by the Chinese government.
For starters, WHO has behaved throughout the entire crisis not as a health organization, but as the unofficial public relations arm of the Chinese Communist Party. It has downplayed Chinese malfeasance all while heaping effusive praise on the authoritarian state for its Johnny-come-lately attempts to clean up the mess it created. So when China launched a large-scale propaganda effort to convince the world it is not responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic and WHO decides suddenly that it is now bad to refer to the virus by its country of origin, you are correct to be suspicious.
This is to say nothing of the fact that WHO itself dropped the ball on the coronavirus back when the virus first emerged in 2019.
Taipei officials say they told the health group in December about “the risk of human-to-human transmission.” However, these officials say, WHO did not pass on the information to other countries. Also, let’s not forget that it was WHO that spread Chinese propaganda in January when it posted a notice on social media that read, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”
Lastly, WHO’s praise for China, which is seemingly nonstop, is always careful to omit mentions of the fact that China arrested and punished whistleblowers who tried to warn the international community about the disease. China also suppressed sharing relevant information with the international community, a detail that WHO also avoids mentioning. China is solely responsible for this pandemic, but you would never know that from following WHO’s handling of the crisis.
WHO is supposed to be a health organization, whose purpose is to serve the needs of the international community. Yet it has conducted itself throughout the COVID-19 episode as a faithful and obedient servant to the Chinese government, putting China’s interests before all else.
As of this writing, the disease, which is already in more than 120 countries, has claimed 8,000 lives. Whatever you do, though, don’t you dare call it the “Chinese virus.” WHO says that is bad.
