Bill Maher Says Coronavirus Should Be Called the ‘Chinese Virus': ‘We Should Blame China’

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bill-maher-says-coronavirus-called-035224775.html

During the “New Rules” segment of Friday’s episode of “Real Time,” Bill Maher waded into some contentious waters when he argued that it should be perfectly OK to refer to coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.”

Of course, the Trump administration has been trying since March to popularize the term “Chinese virus,” which critics say is racist and may have inspired racist attacks on Asian-Americans. But in Maher’s view, the term is useful for understanding where the infection originated and not only that, he argued that China bears some responsibility for its spread.

“Scientists, who are generally pretty liberal, have been naming diseases after the places they came from for a very long time,” Maher said in the segment, delivered like the rest of the episode from his house. “Zika is from the Zika Forest. Ebola from the Ebola River. Hantavirus, the Hantan River.There’s the West Nile Virus and Guinea worm and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and of course the Spanish flu.”

(Sidenote: The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic didn’t actually originate in Spain. But Britain, Germany, France, the U.S. and other nations had imposed severe media censorship during World War I and suppressed information about the illness. Meanwhile in Spain, which didn’t participate in the war, media was free to report on the devastating plague, hence the association. Researchers believe the most likely points of origin are either battlefields in Europe during the war, or Kansas in the United States. Researchers have also suggested possible origins in China.)

Mr then reiterated his point that “this has nothing to do with Asian Americans, and it has everything to do with China. We can’t afford the luxury anymore of non-judginess towards a country with habits that kill millions of people everywhere. Because this isn’t the first time. SARS came from China, and the bird flu, and the Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu.”

“If they were selling nuclear suitcases at these wet markets would we be so non-judgmental? And isn’t this pretty close to what they are selling? And the next one could be even worse,” Maher said. “If the Chinese military had purposefully infected this country with corona as a bioweapon, we’d be at war with them. We’re always griping about how China manipulates their currency. Well, I’m no monetary expert but I think you would agree this one hurt our economy a little more than the currency manipulation. And China can do this. China once built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days.”

“They’re not like us. They can actually get shit done. This is a dictatorship that for decades enforced a one child per family policy under penalty of forced sterilization,” he added. “But you can’t close down the farmer’s market from hell? They need to use that iron fist and pound it down like the whole world depends on it, because it kind of does.”

“And I hope that if someone told Americans that eating hot pockets could cause a worldwide pandemic that we would have the good sense to stop doing it,” Maher concluded. “Although I wouldn’t bet on it.”