I'm going to make the controversial argument that we should actively and deliberately adjust to calling Covid-19 "The Wuhan Virus."
We seem to have instantaneously forgotten that naming viruses after their origins was common and not controversial. I recall zero people shouting "Racism!" or finding anything politically incorrect about referring to the Zika virus by its name even though it was named for a region in Uganda.
So, we thought nothing of referring to the Zika virus by that name and, just as mindlessly, we're refusing to use the words Wuhan virus out of the fear of being labeled as racists.
We have to realize why this is happening.
Yes, a component of the reason is that there are serious morons out there who think that "Chinese" is a race rather than a nationality and are committing crimes against random Asians because they're judging the race. We can't ignore that. We must condemn that. We have to ridicule any and all of those people who even suggest that a whole race of people, or even just people of that nationality, are responsible for the pandemic.
So, I think that there's an understandable hesitance to say the words "Wuhan virus" due to concerns of fueling that hate.
I'm going to give you a couple of reasons why that thinking is wrong:
1 - The information is already out there in regard to the origins of the virus. Simply repeating what everybody already knows isn't going to change anything.
2a - You're letting the dumbest and worst people among us dictate the boundaries of acceptable speech.
2b - Even though there's a moral difference between the well-intended and the badly-intended people who conflate words like Chinese, Mexican, and so-on with race rather than realizing they're references to a nationality, they're all still making the same mistake. Maybe we should learn that thinking that "Chinese" is a reference to a race is just as dumb as assuming that "German" is a reference to a race. This is literally the same mistake that Hitler made.
Still, there's a much bigger issue -- we're buying into bad ideas that are as bad as 2b.
Even the Anti-Defamation League adopted the wildly held definition of "racism" for more than a year which is the lie that racism only applies when it comes to systems that support white people. The Chinese government has remarkable influence in the USA in the media and several other industries. The Chinese government isn't going to argue against that way of thinking in terms of race because they benefit tremendously from it. They also benefit tremendously from the idea that we are the government because they're able to do whatever they want and have mobs of Americans with liberal arts degrees call racism at anybody who criticizes the Chinese government.
By our ardent refusal to use the term "Wuhan virus" we're feeding the global evil of our time. Let's be real, if the virus originated Irkutsk, nobody would be complaining about it being called the Irkutsk virus except for having to pronounce the word.
Finally, calling it the "Wuhan virus" might actually finally be polarizing enough to start a real conversation about the importance of words.
We can finally deal with the nuance that we'll need to deal with if the lab leak theory is true. Namely, we'll have to deal with the reality that we are not the government and that people shouldn't be held to be guilty by association. The idea that people should be held guilty by association has grown exponentially during my lifetime and, at the very least, leftists and woke people will have to deal with the incoherence of their beliefs directly.
We'll be able to talk about the oppression of the Uyghurs as "racist" in clear terms if we can finally spur on this conversation.
We might finally be willing to recognize that China is the closest thing to Nazi Germany that we've had since the fall of the Soviet Union and stop giving their government special treatment because their government leaders aren't white.
I hope people attack me for this suggestion because I know that I'm right and that'll start a conversation that we have to have. We simply haven't been thinking about our language for the last two years and we've been following the parameters of speech set by a foreign dictatorship.