The debate about the moral status of the phrases “Chinese coronavirus” or “Wuhan flu” has been infused with dishonesty from the very beginning. What I think happened, more or less chronologically, is as follows.
In 2015, the World Health Organization released a white paper with “best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases.” It urged scientists not to use place names, like in “West Nile virus” or “Lyme disease.” But this is complicated by the fact that diseases that are not in humans sometimes jump to humans. It can happen in some bat cave or in a wet market or in a research laboratory looking into viruses similar to the coronavirus that caused the Middle East respiratory syndrome of 2012. So, can we name purely animal diseases after places, or is that pejorative? It’s unclear — or contingent. China is suffering from the second wave of an epidemic virus called African swine fever, which has killed a reported 8 million pigs in the past few months, even after the first 2018 wave caused Beijing to have one-quarter of all the domestic pigs on Earth killed in order to stop the spread. China is fine with that name, though some scientists worry it could jump to humans. And China was fine with calling COVID-19 the “American coronavirus” when its state media tried to spread the fraudulent claim that the pandemic originated in the United States.
The WHO best practices thing was not really followed; it was just cited at the outset of the pandemic when China was trying to cover up the origin of the virus and control the global media narrative, partly by using its sway with the WHO. It was never even really coherent, anyway. And the WHO is a compromised organization, as we all learned when a top WHO official refused to so much as recognize such a word as Taiwan. When COVID-19 struck, Chinese newspapers and legacy American outlets initially employed the phrase “Chinese coronavirus,” or phrases like it, because it’s intuitive to name things after where they’re from as a generic or placeholder term. But, after that, President Donald Trump used the phrase with some stink on it. And things Trump said were treated as racist and otherizing until proven innocent.
Thus, most members of the media decided as a group to uphold the counterintuitive norm that saying “Chinese coronavirus” to name a coronavirus from China seemed obviously racist, not just sort of a normal description such as “Lyme disease” or the “Spanish flu.” It became pseudo-true that a good person wouldn’t innocuously verbally associate the pandemic with the place it was from. Only a person who is expressing personal prejudice and wishes to incite physical violence against Asian people would do so, went the conventional unwisdom.
As a final chapter in the ignominious little potted history of this, there were then the variants: the South African variant, the British variant, the Brazilian variant, the Indian variant, and so on. They stoked worries that they would break through the miraculous protection afforded to those of us lucky enough to have been vaccinated. No variant has outsmarted the vaccines yet — though China’s vaccine, the Sinopharm Sinovac, turned out to be a lemon, while almost every other one wildly outperformed expectations.
But if the variants haven’t broken through our immunity strategy, they have exposed the lie behind the claim that the problem with saying “Chinese coronavirus” comes from some general taboo against calling a disease a phrase including the name of a country or people. Nobody objected to “Brazilian variant” as though it was racist against South Americans, though hilariously, Brits did touchily favor “the Kent variant.” It sure seems like China’s dictatorial government under Xi Jinping just didn’t like the bad PR, and that’s what guided the words we use for the virus more than any other single guiding force.
This brings us to now. If you are a news writer or otherwise a public-facing professional in good standing, you are bound by a very contradictory rule set about the words for the virus. You can say “Indian variant” without contributing to a “climate of hate” against “AAPI communities,” but you cannot say “Chinese coronavirus” because Time magazine insists there’s a “pandemic of xenophobia and scapegoating” and Vox spent the period during which the virus broke out in America going on about “microbial xenophobia.” In order to resolve the glaring contradiction between the going rules, STAT reports, we’re canceling the place-named words for variants now: “Under the new scheme, B.1.1.7, the variant first identified in Britain, will be known as Alpha and B.1.351, the variant first spotted in South Africa, will be Beta. P.1, the variant first detected in Brazil, will be Gamma and B.1.671.2, the so-called Indian variant, is Delta.” The new naming system will be kept in an online WHO database categorizing “variants of concern” and “variants of interest” as this plague evolves. At the moment, there are 10 variants, leaving us at the Kappa virus, formerly the second Indian variant. Once just four more variants are detected, this absurd system of avoiding intuitive names for the virus in deference to the wishes of the government of China and the WHO will have caused the WHO to name a virus for the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet: Xi. That’s the name this virus should have had all along.
