President Donald Trump was criticized by liberals and left-wing media pundits for accurately identifying the novel Wuhan coronavirus as a “foreign virus” after countlessly using the term themselves.
“The president referred to the coronavirus as a ‘foreign virus,'” CNN’s Chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta said after the president’s Wednesday night address from the Oval Office. “It’s going to come across to a lot of Americans as smacking of xenophobia to use that kind of term in this speech.”
A new video montage from the Media Research Center however, illustrates a glaring double-standard employed by elites deeming it only racist to point out the origin of the Wuhan virus once done so by Republicans.
Liberal media pundits want you to think referring to the coronavirus as the "Wuhan" or "Chinese" virus is racist.
Here's just a few of the times the liberal media did just that. pic.twitter.com/ss3kV5smSP
— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 12, 2020
“You’re starting to hear the Republicans, especially Trump Co. calling it the ‘Wuhan’ or the ‘Chinese coronavirus.’ They’re looking for someone to blame,” Cuomo says as the start of the video followed by colleague at CNN using the exact term Cuomo denounced.
The video also features reporters from other networks using the virus’ name adopted from the site of its first outbreak.
In fact, it is common practice for diseases to be named after populations or places of their origin such as the West Nile Virus from the West Nile district of Uganda, or the St. Louis Encephalitis. Other examples include Lyme Disease from Lyme, Connecticut, the Guinea Worm from the Guinea coast of West Africa, the German Measles for the German doctors who first described it, the Ross River Fever from Australia, the Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever from Omsk Russia, the Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever from the Ebola River, the Marburg Virus Disease from Marburg, Germany, the Lassa Fever from Lassa, Nigeria, La Crosse Encephalitis from La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
It is even more important however, in the case of the Wuhan coronavirus, to cement its name as China attempted to cover up warnings of the outbreak and downplayed the threat of its severity giving rise to what the World Health Organization has now declared a “global pandemic.” As global stock markets are in free fall, the entire country of Italy is on lockdown, and annual events that draw millions of people are being cancelled across the United States while it braces for what is to come.
As Rich Lowry wrote in National Review, China “deserves to be connected to the virus it did more than its share to loose on the world, no matter what its foreign ministry or the sensitivity police say.”
