3/19/21
As the coronavirus spread across the globe last February, the World Health Organization urged people to avoid terms like the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese virus,” fearing it could spike a backlash against Asians. President Donald Trump didn’t take the advice. On March 16, 2020, he first tweeted the phrase “Chinese virus.” That single tweet, researchers later found, fueled exactly the kind of backlash the WHO had feared: It was followed by an avalanche of tweets using the hashtag #chinesevirus, among other anti-Asian phrases. “The week before Trump’s tweet the dominant term [on Twitter] was #covid-19,” Yulin Hswen, an epidemiology professor at the University of California at San Francisco and a co-author of the study, told The Washington Post. “The week after his tweet, it was #chinesevirus.” Hswen is among a group of researchers who analyzed hundreds of thousands of #covid-19 and #chinesevirus hashtags drafted the week before and after Trump first referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” on the social media platform. Not only did more people use the #chinesevirus hashtag days after Trump’s tweet, but those who did were more likely to include other anti-Asian hashtags in their tweets, according to the peer-reviewed study published by the American Journal of Public Health on Thursday.
he group’s findings come amid a wave of racist attacks and threats against Asian Americans, which some advocates have blamed on Trump’s anti-China rhetoric over the pandemic. Trump repeatedly referred to the disease as the “Chinese virus” and the “Kung flu” during White House briefings, campaign rallies and other public appearances. Earlier this week, he once again called the disease the “China virus” in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. The study also arrives days after eight people, including six Asian women, were shot dead in Atlanta-area spas. While the suspected gunman allegedly blamed a “sex addiction” for the rampage, authorities have not ruled out whether the killings were racially motivated. Dean Winslow, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, said the study’s findings are consistent with what the public has continued seeing in the news: a rise of violence and harassment against Asian Americans. He wonders whether Americans would have used a geographical location to refer to the virus had it originated somewhere in the United States. “It just happened that this particular virus may have arisen in China,” Winslow told The Post. “If this virus had arisen from a cave in New Mexico, I don’t think that people would be tweeting or calling it the ‘New Mexico virus.’ It’s not appropriate. This is science, and viruses don’t discriminate.”