British scientists worried vaccines may not work on South African virus variant | Hacker News Reader

British scientists worried vaccines may not work on South African virus variant

straitstimes.com

5 pointsknown8 comments

I’d take that article with a pinch of salt.

We don’t really know either way and speculation isn’t massively helpful given how dicey info surrounding vaccines and associated media coverage is.

Why is it okay to say South African virus variant but not Wuhan virus, or even just Chinese virus?

Honestly, I think it's a deflection from calling it the UK variant. Calling it the Chinese virus or the South African virus can be perceived as having racist overtones and could also imply that the disease was caused by being simply being Chinese or South African. This could offend someone of said origin, offend someone on behalf of people of those origins, or not offend someone at all. Your next question is probably, "Why was it okay to call the 1918 pandemic the Spanish Flu?" I imagine that in the present day, it wouldn't be okay. We now live in the age of social media, where the opinions and feelings of a small vociferous population can be misconstrued as those of the majority. A no-win scenario then ensues i.e. a culture war. Those who are offended will undoubtedly express their opinions and attempt to publicly shame those who insist on using the name. Those who believe their free speech is threatened or simply wish to agitate the opposition will spitefully continue to use the disputed name. These arguments distract from the real problem at hand: a pandemic.

The logical endpoint of postmodernism where every statement is questioned for intent and therefore no one can make simple observations.

“Someone can perceive it X way” without ever having the burden of offering evidence that that someone even exists.

We can only speak in codes now, things will be identified by hashes or some crap.

Searching Twitter for examples of people decrying "Chinese virus" can come across as confirmation bias. It's also not an accurate measure of how many people truly disapprove of the name. The point is that the argument for or against it is frivolous. As for speaking in codes, you could just call the virus by its actual name, SARS-CoV-2 and the variant G614[0].

[0]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcibr2032888

I was just observing the immediate objections to all the other geographic names but then that apparently doesn’t matter when naming “variants.”

For one, it's called the Spanish Flu because of the newspapers that printed the reports not because of suspected origin.

the article makes clear these are two separate viral variants you are conflating.

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