https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eZtCq1aj2g
Bonus complication of when "the flu is worse" was the narrative:
Insisting on a more neutral name was helpful for distinguishing reliable information from nonsense. But in my opinion the name Sars-Cov-2 was unhelpful in the long run because people just ended up calling it Covid or Coronavirus instead. Wuhan virus would have been a better naming choice, and it was called like that inside China at the beginning. The politicization of the health crisis (instead of showing solidarity first) was the big issue. Worse, it's still ongoing.
If totally neutral names are so important, maybe virologists should start thinking about naming schemes like meteorologists use, e.g. using first names.
- Link B: The clips are a compilation of health experts on MSNBC/CNN in January 2020, when the outbreak was confined to China, telling people they didn't need to worry yet.
I thought we'd emerge from this with an understanding of how quickly things move and operating under uncertainty a la Taleb, but in the current American context, it appears it turned into another reason to triple down on They'ing.
Did you watch the video? Christiane Amanpour is not a health expert.
The media joined the outrage mob only when the wrong people started calling it such. That's more evidence of the early politicization driven by the same media.
I wonder if there's a bit more nuanced way to make this argument, I'm amenable to it, but...it reads more as American culture war than a discussion
That's a fair critique, but I'm inclined to leave a more nuanced argument in someone else's hands. I'll just say I've long suspected massive media collusion and I found the media's almost overnight religious conversion on speech that identified the source of the virus to be jarring and suspiciously in sync.
There are dozens of egregious examples of the media adopting certain language or using certain terms in a sudden, widespread manner. A few examples you can find on Youtube include "power through", "beginning of the end", "walls closing in", etc.
I do think the media monoculture is partially to blame, but I don't that accounts for all of it.
Immediately, that usage is widely decried as horribly offensive, and even groups that routinely used it pile on to join the attack:
"When (my opponent) said X today, it shows they are horrible and intend terrible things, whereas my use of it yesterday/last year (or in the future!) was completely innocent."
Did my opponent politicize it by using language known to be offensive, as a callout to their constituency?
Or did I politicize it by criticizing them, as a callout to my constituency?
Or do they politicize it by continuing to use it afterward?