Words matter: Trump's names for the coronavirus emboldened his followers, says study

Donald Trump's use of racist terms when referring to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, "likely perpetuated racist attitudes." according to a new study.

There apparently is some evidence that supports blaming the former White House occupant for unleashing a torrent of ant-Asian sentiment, giving rise to the year-long surge of violence against Asians and Asian Americans culminating (thus far) in the mass shootings in Georgia killing eight people, including six Asian women. 

A new study suggests that Donald Trump's inflammatory rhetoric around the coronavirus, which is believed to have originated in China, helped spark anti-Asian Twitter content and "likely perpetuated racist attitudes."

Over a year ago, in the week after Trump first tweeted about “the Chinese virus,” the number of coronavirus-related tweets with anti-Asian hashtags rose precipitously, a new study from UC San Francisco has found.

The study examined nearly 700,000 tweets containing nearly 1.3 million hashtags, the week before and after the president’s tweet on March 16, 2020, to see whether his use of the term “Chinese virus” – an expression that public health experts warned against using – may have led others to use anti-Asian language on Twitter.

The UCSF researchers found that users who adopted the hashtag #chinesevirus were far more likely to pair it with overtly racist hashtags.

Dr. Yulin Hswen

The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health in its March 18, 2021 issue, comes as the country is experiencing an alarming surge of violent attacks on people of Asian descent and lends support to warnings by public health experts that naming a disease after a place or a group of people is stigmatizing.

“These results may be a proxy of growth in anti-Asian sentiment that was not as prevalent as before,” said Yulin Hswen, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF and the study's lead author. “Using racial terms associated with a disease can result in the perpetuation of further stigmatization of racial groups.”

Officials of the World Health Organization purposely avoided attaching geography to the virus, as was the practice in the past, to avoid casting blame on a group of people or region. But Trump insisted on tying China to COVID-19 at every turn. A news photographer took a picture of one of Trump's early speeches and he had crossed out "corona" in the word "coronavirus" and replaced in thick black marker with "China."

Standing by his words, even in the face of criticism that it might lead to racial profiling of Asian Americans, Trump claimed it was a "very accurate term," the virus "came from China."

 In a prepared speech, Donald Trump crossed out "corona" and inserted "Chinese."

Playing to the racist nature of some in his base has been Trump's strategy from the beginning of his run for president. When he announced his candidacy in 2015, he blamed the undocumented immigrants from Mexico as "bad hombres" and "rapists." His deliberate appeals to white racists worked well enough to win him the White House.

Hswen said the results of the study demonstrate how important it is to use neutral language when naming diseases and other threats to public health. And she expressed alarm that as recently as March of 2021, Trump continues to refer to the Covid-19 vaccine as the “China Virus Vaccine.”

“Chinese virus, China virus, Wuhan virus, or any derivative of these terms is not something we should be using,” Hswen said. “We should not be attaching location or ethnicity to diseases.”