Wiremu Kingi Te Awe Awe of Rangitāne reflects on the relationship between Māori and the media. As Carmen Parahi wrote in her editorial, “the superiority of European, mainly British, migrants, and the inferiority of Māori was repeated over and over by our editors and newspapers. It was racist”. That racism existed through the decades and centuries, up and down the country, and one of the aspects of the investigation I found most illuminating was the region-by-region examination of our reporting. The
Taranaki Daily News,
Stuff’s oldest newspaper, said it needed to “account for the legacy of our journalism forefathers”, which, in the case of Parihaka, involved reporting which “was complicit in the calculated attack by the Crown. We purposefully sided with the Government to protect the economic aspirations of settlers in Taranaki to the detriment of the rights of Māori”.
How science went to war with Covid-19
It took over a month for the mysterious virus and its disease to be given a name. SARS-CoV-2 refers to the virus, Covid-19 the disease.
The names couldn’t refer to a geographical location, an animal or an individual or group of people, the World Health Organisation (WHO) ordered. It needed to be easy to pronounce and relate to the disease.
“I’ll spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine – COVID-19,” WHO director-general Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in February.
It is commonly referred to via its disease name - Covid-19.
“I think SARS-CoV-2 probably doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so well,” University of Auckland microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles says.
Before we knew it was a pandemic
On a Tuesday morning, just over a year ago, shrimp vendor Wei Guixian went to work.
She felt tired, but persevered and went about her day selling live seafood at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market.
She dismissed her lethargy and put it down to the seasonal flu that she catches every year. But for peace of mind, Wei walked to the local health clinic for an assessment and an injection.
The next day, her condition deteriorated. She made another trip to another hospital to get a second opinion. She left with a prescription and no helpful answers.