It was definitely some random scary bullshit on the internet that co-mingled the two. But so much of the hype in the early days of COVID ended up being FUD used by the administration to justify draconian anti-immigration policies. We had FOX News screaming about Leprosy and “Mexican Flu” being transmitted by Migrant Caravans decades before that. Any disease outbreak became an excuse to hyper-police people entering the US at the borders.
Part of the problem with all this disease discourse is that it’s routinely anti-foreigner agitprop. This goes straight back to The Spanish Flu, which originated from a Haskell County, Kansas pig farm and got spread across Europe by WW1-era US soldiers. It became major weapon of the 20th century reactionary right to ban Italian Immigrants way back then. Now we see disease scares used to freeze out everyone from Taiwan to Brazil to Afganistan. If anyone is sick anywhere, it’s an excuse to ban migrants everywhere.
It was definitely some random scary bullshit on the internet that co-mingled the two. But so much of the hype in the early days of COVID ended up being FUD used by the administration to justify draconian anti-immigration policies. We had FOX News screaming about Leprosy and “Mexican Flu” being transmitted by Migrant Caravans decades before that. Any disease outbreak became an excuse to hyper-police people entering the US at the borders.
Part of the problem with all this disease discourse is that it’s routinely anti-foreigner agitprop. This goes straight back to The Spanish Flu, which originated from a Haskell County, Kansas pig farm and got spread across Europe by WW1-era US soldiers. It became major weapon of the 20th century reactionary right to ban Italian Immigrants way back then. Now we see disease scares used to freeze out everyone from Taiwan to Brazil to Afganistan. If anyone is sick anywhere, it’s an excuse to ban migrants everywhere.