London mayor Sadiq Khan has complained that it is “disgraceful” to refer to the Wuhan coronavirus as “Chinese”, insisting it is a “global virus”.
“Covid-19 is Covid-19,” Khan declared to the London Assembly following a question from Unmesh Desai, who like the Mayor is a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
“It is not a Chinese virus, and to use words like that are disgraceful [sic], and is the sort of language that leads to incitement and hatred towards people of Chinese origin,” he alleged.
“We are a city that celebrates our diversity and we think it is a strength, not a weakness, and it’s really important that we don’t follow into the trap of some to use this virus as an excuse to denigrate, demean, and dehumanise people,” he continued.
“And what’s really important is if we see people picked on, discriminated against, because of this virus, we act to stand with them in solidarity — but also the police will continue to have a zero-tolerance approach towards any form of hate crime,” he threatened.
“[W]e need a global response to this global virus, coming together rather than using this as another excuse to divide communities and divide countries and divide nations and divide ethnicities,” he insisted.
#Coronavirus: The coronavirus is not ‘Chinese’. Viruses do not have nationalities.
Thank you @unmeshdesai for raising this question. #MQT pic.twitter.com/wPhz9lw8th
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) March 19, 2020
Mayor Khan’s stance, perhaps unsurprisingly, contrasts sharply with that of President Trump’s British supporters, such as Nigel Farage.
The Brexit Part leader believes President Trump was absolutely right to lay the blame for the virus at the Chinese Communist Party’s door, partly through permitting cruel and unhygenic “wet markets” where “living, dead or dying creatures as diverse as bats, pangolins and other [creatures] are held in close proximity, their body fluids and all the bacteria, viruses and parasites they carry mixing and mutating in direct contact with human shoppers,” but mainly through its efforts to actively cover-up the disease’s emergence and aggressively silence whistleblowers during its early stages.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, associating diseases with a particular place or nationality was uncontroversial — as with, for example, German measles, Spanish flu, or Ebola, which is named for the Ebola River in Africa — and indeed many mainstream media outlets on the coronavirus referred to it as the “Wuhan virus” during their early reporting on it.
The Chinese regime, which is currently engaged in spreading rumours that the virus was seeded in Wuhan by the U.S. Army, applied strong pressure to put a stop to this.
Farage: Communist China Regime Responsible for Virus ‘Nightmare’ https://t.co/xWJCmj7Ie3
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 19, 2020
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