Following our study on online discourse on animal rights activism, this study examines the similarities between HIV and COVID-19 discourses. 424 posts and 10,238 comments collected from an England-based online animal rights community revealed that animal rights discourses tend to be racist and Western-centric, under the guise of “criticizing animal abuse.”

This tendency has been fueled by the emergence of COVID-19, which facilitated commenters to accuse Asian countries/cultures of “spreading the disease.” One of the significant traits of the comments is how they depict COVID-19 as “a punishment” to Asian countries. The data below is a comment on a post criticizing dog meat consumption in China.

Data 1 (March 13^th, 2020)

Wonder if they're eating any dogs now, seeing that they were so disgusting the universe punished them with the Coronavirus, KARMA is real!

This is similar to how HIV was represented as “God’s wrath/punishment” to homosexual people for “violating natural law.” Here, COVID-19 has been described as a punishment to those who participate in barbaric practices which seem unnatural to Western cultures. Another similarity is the way commenters associated COVID-19 with specific social groups and called it “the Chinese/China virus.” Data 2 is a comment on the Daily Mail’s article about China’s move to exclude dogs from farm animals.

Data 2 (May 30^th, 2020)

They must pay damages for their chineese [sic] virus Covid 19....

HIV was called “Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome.” Similarly, terms like the above  produce the meanings and narrative of the disease (Treichler, 1999); we argue for other similarities and present more examples comparing HIV and COVID-19 narratives, demonstrating how both were constructed as “a disease of others” as a conclusion.

Reference

Paula A. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham and London: Duke PU,1999) 11-41.