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ABSTRACT
Arriving in the U.S. in early 2020, COVID-19 is called “the deadliest pandemic since the 1918 flu.” Mitigation measures include masks and vaccinations, but many resist and demonstrate against them. The unvaccinated continue to harbor the virus; they now form the largest group of COVID patients in hospitals, enabling the virus to continue to spread. Diverse conservative and far-right sources push conspiracy theories and other disinformation that fuel resistance to mitigation, claiming in some cases that the pandemic is a hoax. COVID metaphors themselves, however, suggest lines of counter-argument and ways to potentially shift their meanings and consequences.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Mark Johnson ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).
2 These theories are complex and deserve more attention than I can give them here. For a fuller treatment, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Mark Johnson’s 1981 edited Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, and Elena Semino and Zsófia Demjén, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (London: Routledge, 2017). See also Elena Semino’s description of the multinational and multidisciplinary #ReframeCOVID online project, a different approach to metaphor (“‘Warriors or Fire-Fighters?’—Metaphors and COVID-19,” Health Communication 36, no. 1, 2021).
3 Bob Woodward, Rage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 211–15.
4 Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History (New York: Harper Collins, 2021).
5 Abutaleb and Paletta, Nightmare Scenario (2021), 35.
6 Abutaleb and Paletta, Nightmare Scenario (2021) provide a detailed chronicle of the pandemic in the U.S. and China drawing on news reports, health assessments, official responses and interviews. For a description of the early months, see especially pp. 11–22 for an overview and p. 32 for a summary of the Wuhan lockdown and U.S. efforts to control flights to and from China. According to Bob Woodward’s 2020 book Rage, when scientist Anthony Fauci heard about the novel virus, “he thought Holy Shit” (p. 220). Rage reports COVID developments throughout Donald Trump’s fourth year as president. (Woodward, Rage, 2020).
7 Michelle Power and Meagan Dewar, “COVID Has Reached Antarctica. Scientists Are Extremely Concerned for Its Wildlife,” The Wire Science, February 10, 2021. https://theconversation.com/covid-has-reached-antarctica-scientists-are-extremely-concerned-for-its-wildlife-154481.
8 Matt Pottinger, deputy national security advisor, quoted in Abutaleb and Paletta, Nightmare Scenario (2021) 32.
9 Marina Levina (pp. 80–100) considers globalization and the problem of security in the case of several pandemics. Marina Levina, Pandemics and the Media (New York: Peter Lang, 2015). See also Michael C. Bender and Gordon Lubold, “On Coronavirus National Security Threats, O’Brien Picks His Spots,” Wall Street Journal (April 29, 2020).
10 Bender and Lubold (2020).
11 Matthew J. Belvedere, “Trump Says He Trusts China’s Xi on the Coronavirus and the US Has It Totally under Control,” Interview from The Davos Agenda, CNBC, January 22, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/22/trump-on-coronavirus-from-china-we-have-it-totally-under-control.html.
12 Kevin Breuninger, “Media’s Coronavirus Stories Trying to Hurt Trump, Mick Mulvaney Says as He Urges Public to Turn off TV,” CNBC (February 28, 2020).
13 Lauren Caruba, “Life Aboard a ‘Modern Day Plague Ship’: Diamond Princess Passenger Quarantined in San Antonio Writes Book about Ordeal,” San Antonio Express-News (November 30, 2020).
14 Willis Haisten and Vanessa Williams, “A Funeral Is Thought to Have Sparked a COVID-19 Outbreak in Albany, GA—and Led to Many More Funerals,” Washington Post (April 4, 2020). Katy Reckdahl, Campbell Robertson and Richard Faussett, “New Orleans Faces a Virus Nightmare, and Mardi Gras May Be Why,” New York Times (April 13, 2020).
15 Lois Zoppi (2021) outlines how viruses are named in “The Naming System behind SARS-CoV-2,” News Medical (March 9, 2021). See also Levina on the naming of “swine flu” (2015, chap. 3); Paula A Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), chapter 1; and Jamie L. Feldman, Plague Doctors: Responding to the AIDS Epidemic in France and America (Bergin & Garsey, 1995), chapter 3.
16 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978); Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989); Paul Elie, “(Against) Virus as Metaphor,” The New Yorker (March 19, 2020); Ian Buruma, “Virus as Metaphor,” New York Times (March 28, 2020); David Craig, “The Pandemic and its Metaphors: Sontag revisited in the COVID-19 Era,” European Journal of Cultural Studies (July 7, 2020).
17 This is a metaphor with a specific origin: “Ride it like a cowboy!” was delivered by former president Donald Trump at a 2020 briefing, as reported by AP journalist Calvin Woodward. Woodward, “Viral Virus Briefing: Where Science Meets All Things Trump,” San Diego Union-Tribune (March 31, 2020).
18 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (trans. Duncan Large. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
19 Emily Anthes, in “Subway Swabbers,” describes a scientific study that found mass quantities of of viruses and bacteria on subways around the world, some never before identified. “Subway Swabbers Find a Microbe Jungle and Thousands of New Species,” New York Times (May 26, 2021).
20 “The Rise In Anti-Asian Attacks During The COVID-19 Pandemic,” National Public Radio (March 10, 2021). https://www.npr.org
21 See Jack Z. Bratich (2008) for a taxonomy of AIDS conspiracy theories that includes Fort Detrick as a significant node. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 172–3.
22 Abutaleb and Paletta, Nightmare Scenario (2021).
23 Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2019).
24 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980).
25 “The Rise In Anti-Asian Attacks During The COVID-19 Pandemic,” NPR (March 10, 2021).
26 For data as of September 2021, see Jennifer Kates, Jennifer Tolbert and Kendal Orgera, “The Red/Blue Divide in COVID-19 Vaccination Rates,” COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor Kaiser Family Foundation (September 14, 2021).
27 Merlan calls the Anti-Vaxx movement “the most successful medical conspiracy” of recent decades—“persistent, lucrative, perpetually able to net new believers in spite of scientific evidence” (Republic of Lies, 2019, 128). Chapter 6, called “Medical Oddities,” argues that medical conspiracies “have unique power to do harm” 121–22.
28 Merlan dubs Alex Jones “the king of dubious health claims” (Republic of Lies, 2019, 144).
29 For one example, see Daniel Estrin, “How Israel Persuaded Reluctant Ultra-Orthodox Jews to Get Vaccinated against COVID-19,” NPR KCRW Radio Station (April 22, 2021).
30 Treichler, How To Have Theory (1999), 1.