Trump Fires Back at Complaints He’s Stigmatizing China Over Coronavirus

President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired back at Chinese complaints that he has created a negative stigma by referring to the coronavirus a "Chinese virus."

"I have to call it where it came from. I think it's a very accurate term," Trump said during a wide-ranging press conference at the White House alongside the coronavirus task force tasked with managing the federal response.

His remarks came hours after China's foreign ministry expressed outrage at the president's use of that term in an early morning tweet about how the virus has affected certain U.S. states more than others. Many of the president's top officials, supporters and political surrogates have used similar terms, such as "Wuhan virus," to describe the disease.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters that using such terms unfairly smears China and creates a negative stigma against Chinese people.

Trump in his response fired back at reports that Chinese officials and its state-run news outlets have propped up a conspiracy theory that the U.S. government created the disease, and that an Army soldier spread it to Wuhan during a visit in October.

"China was putting out information that was false that our military gave this to them, that was false," Trump said Tuesday. "I think saying our military gave it to them creates a stigma."

Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, in February raised provocative questions about whether the outbreak of the coronavirus could be related to a Chinese infectious disease laboratory located near the origin of the outbreak. Health officials have largely debunked theories that the virus was manufactured in a lab.

International officials have warned against the negative effects of associating diseases with where they originated. Ebola, for example, is named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where health officials discovered the first instances of the disease.

"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself," World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated earlier this month about the coronavirus outbreak.

Anti-Asian attacks and other forms of xenophobia against Asian populations have increased in the U.S, U.K. and other countries affected by the pandemic.