US politicians' abracadabra some age-old hocus-pocus

Writing about the bubonic plague in London in 1665, Daniel Defoe described people wearing charms or amulets bearing the word abracadabra on them to ward off the plague, as if the disease was "but a kind of a possession of an evil spirit".

The way some in the US administration speak about China, and not only in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, you cannot help but wonder if they too bear such talismans about their persons, since they seem to believe that if not a wielder of sorcery, and so able to command malign spirits to do its bidding, then Beijing must be a bestower of the evil eye.

From the earliest times, people have had a tendency to blame evil spirits for misfortunes such as sickness and disease. The 2nd century medical treatise Liber Medicinalis describes how such abracadabra talismans were created. The word was written repeatedly below itself, each time omitting the final letter until only the single "a" remained, the arrangement forming an inverted pyramid. This was a later incarnation of the ancient oral spells whereby the influence of a malign deity manifest as sickness and disease was to be defeated by progressively reducing the word in speech until reaching complete silence.

It would be more pleasing to the ear if those in the US bad-mouthing China had reached such a point, unfortunately they have become increasingly strident in their bid to conflate people's fear of the virus with a fear of China.

Although suitably shrouded in mystery, the origin of the word abracadabra is likely the ancient Aramaic phrase avra kadavra, which literally means "I will create as I speak"－in other words, let it be as I say.

And in harping on their accusations that China is at least responsible for the scale of the pandemic, if not the originator, the US administration seems to be hoping it will have more success than it has had hitherto in persuading other countries to side with it against China, as well as convincing the US public that the blame for the country's chaotic response to the spread of the novel coronavirus has nothing to do with it not heeding the warnings it was given.

It is ever the jealous temper of mankind to censure rather than praise the work of others, and with China's success in controlling the contagion in stark contrast to the flawed response of the US, where the administration has been desperately playing catch-up with what is happening on the ground, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others have intensified their attacks on China.

Given that conservative attitudes, fundamentalist thinking and religiosity have been found to be associated with a belief that evil spirits can be contagious and contaminating, it is perhaps not surprising that it has chosen to politicize the pandemic in this way.

Many of the US administration's pronouncements have been at odds with the science-based advice it has been receiving from medical advisers, and the denial of science is a hallmark of the administration.

Which is perhaps why it is still pushing the claim that the virus was engineered in a lab in Wuhan, despite it not standing up to scrutiny. A group of researchers compared the genome of the novel coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans, and writing of the results of their comparisons in the journal Nature Medicine in March concluded that "it is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus".

There is no shortage of examples throughout history of how people imagined a relationship between evil and illness, and how those showing signs of evil influence in the form of disease would be isolated and shunned, even killed.

Whether it realizes it or not, the US administration's bid to portray China as a sickness is just an age-old practice in a new guise.

The author is a writer with China Daily.