There's a semantic difference with "X virus" and "Y variant". "X virus" denotes the virus was caused by country X and is behind it all, whereas "Y variant" denotes it was mutated in there but is not the root cause of it all.
I don't think that's true. West Nile Virus wasn't caused by people West of the Nile, the Spanish Flu wasn't caused by Spain, MERS is called that because it was discovered in the Middle East, not because people in the Middle East caused it, etc. The form "X virus" does not at all imply that the virus was caused by X.
Then, of course, there is the very real possibility that China literally did cause the virus.
I don't think there is so much, the distinction between "caused by" and "discovered there" escapes most people in casual use
Imho the reason this time it was different with terms like "China flu" is not that it's generally unacceptable to nickname an illness by it's region of first discovery, but that Trump was actively using this terminology to push an agenda
Yeah, at a certain point back in 2020 it suddenly was very bad to have variants with geographic origin in the naming. Although that was how it had been done in many other cases.
> The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another kind of harm: the insult and stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals. Among the existing monikers that its new guidelines “for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift Valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox.
is an excellent example of why that kind of naming is stupid, given that it likely first appeared in the US and primarily became known as "spanish" because Spain (not being at war) was actually talking about it instead of censoring reports about it.