There are forces deliberately driving racism against the Asian community over the COVID-19 pandemic, warned a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official. 

Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, said Asian people or those of Asian descent – living abroad – have suffered discrimination due to disinformation connecting them to the pandemic.

"[There's] Discrimination based on misinformation and based on horrific prejudice regarding whole peoples around this disease. And that's been generated. And that's been driven. And that's been manipulated," said Ryan.

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Incidents of anti-Asian racism have been increasingly occurring in many Western countries. In 2020, the New York Police Department reported that hate crimes, motivated by anti-Asian sentiment, jumped 1,900 percent in New York City. 

And the violence continued in 2021, with U.S. President Joe Biden signing an executive order denouncing anti-Asian discrimination shortly after taking office in January. 

From the early months of the pandemic, the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) reported on a spike in anti-Asian attacks, some of it blamed on disinformation proliferating online.  

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Ryan noted that COVID-19 has "peeled back some of the coverage we've had over the existing prejudices in our society, the existing stigmas and the existing problems of discrimination."

The problem goes beyond racism and exposes other forms of discrimination. "We've seen the impacts of long-term discrimination and long-term lack of access to good diets, lack of access to good health care, lack of access to good education, has led to an explosion of underlying conditions that have themselves driven the death rate," he said. 

"Remember, the virus is not the only thing driving death."

The virus may have exposed the world's existing class and racial tensions, but counter to this are "the most wonderful examples of solidarity," said Ryan. 

"I'm really, really upset, particularly about the profiling of groups, which has been politically motivated. But I'm also heartened by what I believe is still in the heart of all of our most humans – is a desire to connect, a desire to understand, a desire to support each other."

Video editor: Terry Wilson

(Cover image: Mike Ryan. /Martial Trezzini/Keystone/AFP)