Does It Matter What We Call a Disease?

The very names of such diseases are felt to have a magic power. — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)

It took six weeks for the World Health Organization to bestow a name on the new viral respiratory disease that emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, China: COVID-19, an acronym for COronaVIrus Disease 2019. The naming process was slow and deliberate because of WHO disease-naming guidelines released in 2015, which rule out eponyms (diseases named for people, such as Down syndrome or Alzheimer’s disease), place names (such as Lyme disease or West Nile virus), and occupational associations (such as Legionnaire’s disease). The goal in naming the new virus, said WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his February 11 announcement, was “to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing.”

It was a fair and worthy objective, honored by many in the public sphere. But not by all.

Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business Network anchor known for his strident anti-immigration views, has repeatedly insisted on calling COVID-19 “the Wuhan virus.”

House of Representatives Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy calls it the “Chinese coronavirus.” “It’s a China-born disease,” he tweeted on March 10. “Which is…