What’s in a variant name? Plenty
As coronavirus has spread and mutated itself to adapt to shifting circumstances over the past year, politicians, policy makers and media organizations have had to adapt, too, in trying to explain and quantify new variants.
As humans, we’re quick to latch on to labels, especially simple ones that people can remember.
But labelling things and trying to fit them all into neat boxes can be dangerous.
The Washington Post reported that as the coronavirus began to reach the United States, photographers captured images of then president Donald Trump’s speaking notes at a news conference, in which he had scratched out “corona” and replaced it with “Chinese.”
Trump would go on to shorten “Chinese virus” to “China virus” in many of his speeches, sparking outrage among many Asian Americans — and Asians everywhere — who felt the brunt of stigma and racism as a result.
“Trump’s goal in using ‘Chinese virus’ seems to be to avoid blame for the pandemic by redirecting anger toward China,” the Post reported. “Trying to avoid blame is nothing new in politics. … Foreigners are often blamed for new diseases.”
Of course, not everyone links a virus variant to geography to deflect or assign blame. Sometimes a label gets picked up and enters common parlance because it’s easy to remember and say and report. And so we have the “Brazil variant,” the “South African variant,” the “Indian variant,” the “U.K. variant” — all terms that have been used by media organizations, including this one.
But it’s time to change if we want to avoid contributing to the very real dangers of geopolitical stigma.
As the journal Nature observed, the geographical labels don’t even make sense: “Variants are not necessarily identified in the country where they emerged, and fast-spreading variants such as B.1.1.7… that are spotted in one nation will eventually spill out into the wider world. Geographical associations could also stigmatize countries and so discourage surveillance (and reporting of new variants) …”
The World Health Organization has long cautioned against being lax in adopting labels to describe new infectious diseases.
In a 2015 call to action, the WHO urged scientists, politicians, health authorities and the news media to follow best practices in naming diseases so as not to create negative impacts on nations, economies and people.
“This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’S assistant director-general for health security. “We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade… This can have serious consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods.”
Variant names like B.1.1.7 may not trip off the tongue, but they’re more scientifically meaningful, and they do less harm.