Asian American hate is on the rise. And it is no accident that xenophobic pandemic conspiracies contributed to nearly 75 percent of Chinese Americans experiencing racial discrimination and hate in the past year.
Against this backdrop, so many—especially Republican members of Congress—still peddle a certain narrative that China deliberately spread the virus, despite no scientificevidence that the virus was purposefully engineered in a Wuhan lab.
Importantly, the racist and xenophobic lens through which many Americans and elected officials viewed the COVID-19 pandemic also skewed efforts to trace and understand the early spread of the virus. While U.S. politicians and scientists were quick to demand an investigation into the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in China, little attention was paid to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in multiple regions of Italy in December 2019, or to a retroactive analysis that found a patient in France also had SARS-CoV-2 in December 2019. Despite these findings published in 2021 and 2020, respectively, we have yet to see a U.S. politician publicly demand an investigation into the early spread of COVID-19 in Western Europe.
Now, more than three years later, Americans’ understanding of COVID-19 continues to be distorted by xenophobia and often divorced from scientific evidence.