As coronavirus continues to spread through the U.S., resulting in the deaths of at least 33 people and threatening to topple many aspects of Americans’ daily lives, right-wing media is going against the advice of public health experts by trying to rebrand COVID-19 as the “Wuhan” or “Chinese” virus.

The ongoing efforts to rebrand coronavirus come amid speculation and concern over the political impact that COVID-19 could have on President Donald Trump’s reelection chances in 2020. Desperate to shift the associated blame off of Trump -- whose administration’s slow initial response potentially exacerbated the spread of the virus -- right-wing media figures have now taken up the cause of arguing that the virus needs to be called the “Wuhan” or “Chinese” virus, in order to associate coronavirus with the country it originated from.

The right’s characterization of coronavirus as the “Wuhan” virus, named for the Chinese city where it was first identified, directly reflects public health officials’ concerns about giving the virus a shorthand name. The World Health Organization chose COVID-19 as a “clinical and nondescript” name in order to avoid “stigmatization of the place from which it originated.”

The conversation that has emerged out of right-wing media’s stubborn insistence that coronavirus must be attached to the city and country it struck first is “precisely the type of geopolitical back-and-forth that health officials have tried to avoid since releasing more stringent guidelines for naming viruses in 2015,” warned Frank Snowden, Yale University professor emeritus of history and history of medicine, in an interview with The New York Times. Snowden went on to explain why public health officials have made an effort to move away from associating diseases with geographical locations, and why stigmatizing the virus name can become problematic: