I have heard nobody call it the “Wuhan Virus”. There is no good explanation for this name other than the desire to attach stigma to China.
That's a huge misrepresentation of why WHO made those recommendations. The main point is that closing borders is ineffective and so you end up with only the negatives of doing that (and WHO stressed more the negatives around how it affects global supply chains and such for medical things).
Of course now pretty much every country has closed their borders or at least severely restricted travel, and they did that because it works. But we have lost weeks without using a major tool to prevent virus spread, because of this virtue signalling that has cost lives.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/04/coronavirus-quarati...
Every virus comes from a place, but many viruses are not named for a place even when the place of origin is known, and even the ones that have a place in the name are only rarely named “<place> virus” (e.g, “West Nile virus”), e.g., they are often named something Rose like “<place> <genus> (e.g., Zaire ebolavirus.) And even then, they are often referred to without the place name unless there is a specific need to differentiate within the genus (e.g., the virus with the species name Zaire ebolavirus is usually referred to simply as “Ebola”; it's not called “the Zaire virus”.)
SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, (both from China), and Hedgehog Coronavirus 1 (Europe) are all members of the betacoronavirus species with a particular identified geographic origin that don't have anything about geography in their name. And MERS-related coronavirus only has geography in it's name by way of the the name of the syndrome it was later identified as causing.
This isn't true at all. No one is really worried about racism with regard to COVID-19, and instead, we're all very focused on health and safety. Injecting politics into this is distracting and unhelpful.
- The initial Chinese response was just to minimize, but then take the situation seriously when they realized the gravity of it.
- The "China virus" nomenclature is just a distraction, the intent is to make political enemies the focus in the US instead of focusing on the virus.
- The presumably CCP generated "US Soldier" claim has come later, and does not seem to be related to counter messaging the "China Virus language," except insofar as it might help continue to muddle US politics.
Are we preparing to blame that on Trump too, now?
Moreover, most diseases have symptomatic names (scarlet fever) or generic names (influenza). Keeping this in trend would be in line with the 2015 WHO recommendations.
Leishmaniasis is named after a person.
HIV and AIDS were originally called GRID, which severely hampered research, funding, and treatment.
So you’re arguing based on a faulty premise.
There's no consensus over where the Spanish flu originated from.
Would give us another reason not to name it for a place, as our knowledge might change after a name is established. At the end the names stays around for >100 years, although being wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Hypotheses_about_t...
Well, that's clearly not true. Swine Flu, H1N1 Pandemic, Ebola epidemic, SARS... the exception is MERS.
There is an irony in linking to that Wiki article that states that Ebola was not named after the town it was discovered for the exact reason some are saying COVID-19 shouldn't be named after Wuhan or China.
Discovered in 1993 near the Canyon del Muerte on the Navajo Reservation, it was originally named the Muerto Canyon hantavirus, in keeping with the convention for naming new pathogens.[2] However, the Navajo Nation objected to the name in 1994.[3] It was also near the Four Corners point in the United States, so the virologists then tried naming it the "Four Corners virus". The name was changed after local residents raised objections.[4] In frustration, the virologists changed it to Sin Nombre, meaning "without a name" in Spanish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus_disease#1967_out...
I think that in an effort to guard against the absolute lowest common denominator of human behavior, a lot of people's paternalistic tendencies come out. Treating people like children to keep everyone safe. It's the justification for censorship used by every authoritarian regime. Ironically, the attitude of shaping the publicity of knowledge to shape human behavior is exactly what caused the police to detain this hero for having the audacity to talk to his colleagues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang