Except it is TVs and newspapers that were lecturing us that it was racist to call it the chinese flu and that are now happily using the xx-variant designation. It is the obvious bad faith that I find appalling.
By the time it is deemed a variant, it has been sequenced number of times across the country and the health authorities always have a code or name to refer to this particular strain.
They had a code but not a name. The media can't refer to things by a confusing jumble of letters and numbers, they need a name, and if there's no official name then the media will create one themselves. Hence "India variant".
This is basic PR, e.g. when Heartbleed was disclosed it was given a name so that people could discuss it and attach meaning to it.
It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember. Hence why the papers here in the UK now tend to say something like 'the Delta variant, which was first seen in India' - that's only marginally better than 'the Indian variant' tbh.
> It's good, but it's not exactly easy to remember [[.]
Saying "$origin virus" is _definitely_ easier to remember than - say - something like "Covid19".
Except that we were told that using "$origin" was racist, so we had to stop, and we had to use the non-easy-to-remember version.
Where we are the media has been happily talking about "the British variant" and "the Indian variant", but no-one seems to be calling _that_ racist. At least no-one who the media cares about.