Conservatives Try to Rebrand the Coronavirus
Until recently, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, was most famous for tweeting a lie: a faked photo of President Barack Obama shaking hands with Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran. This weekend, Gosar made news with another tweet: In response to the report that he had been in contact with a man confirmed to have contracted the novel coronavirus, he announced that he was placing himself in self-quarantine from what he called the “Wuhan virus.”
Scientists are using the internationally accepted name COVID-19 to describe the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that was discovered late last year. But a number of prominent conservatives—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas—are going with , as if the deadly new pathogen were one more scourge to be blamed on the Chinese. As many of
