Virus slur against China rejected

US politicians' stigmatization of China on the novel coronavirus has sparked concerns over racial discrimination and their disrespect for medical science and disregard for the World Health Organization, analysts say.

The WHO named the novel coronavirus COVID-19 on Feb 11, when its chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said it was both for scientific purposes and to avoid stigmatization over the country where the virus first became known.

"To stigmatize a country or a location by associating the virus with that place is improper," said K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. "It is not only anti-science, but is xenophobic.

" (The world needs to) move to shared values of respecting countries and respecting ethnicities and adopting a fully respectful non-discriminatory attitude toward all populations, and not encouraging xenophobia in any way that links any ethnic group in a negative association with any disease."

Helen Sawczak, national CEO of the Australia China Business Council, considers the sort of commentary by the US politicians as "particularly unnecessary and unhelpful", and regards COVID-19 as a global humanitarian crisis that will have profound economic impacts.

"WHO officials have emphasized that the virus does not have an ethnicity, does not respect borders and requires a united response," Sawczak said.

"As China is beginning to contain the virus, and resume normal life, Australia and other countries are beginning to deal with major disruptions to their way of life in response to COVID-19 as it spreads to other parts of the world."

In her view, Australian companies are keen to ride out this storm, and restore business confidence and get back to normal as quickly as possible. The road to recovery from this pandemic and its economic impact will require much greater international cooperation and a de-escalation of tensions between all parties.

Racist sentiments

Aaron Jed Rabena, a research fellow for Manila-based think tank Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress, said that US President Donald Trump's emphasizing the "Chineseness" of the virus stigmatizes China as a country. "It can also inflame racist sentiments－and not just against the Chinese," the researcher said.

He has observed that other Asians, too, are victimized because of their similar appearance to Chinese, pointing to reports of people in Europe and the US attacking Asians and blaming them for the outbreak.

Reddy said: "India also had this problem of a similar kind. So we are no strangers to this nature of propaganda, which is xenophobic. We fully have solidarity with the Chinese position on this, at least the scientists do. And I believe that we shall together counter this."