It has been a year since COVID-19 lockdowns plunged the world into despair, with leaders and health authorities all over the world scrambling to defend their people from the 2019 novel coronavirus, which is believed to have come from a Wuhan lab in China.
Early reports claimed that COVID-19, which has taken 2.69 million lives globally, moved from bats to humans in a Wuhan wet market. But today, overwhelming evidence shows that it was a lab leak that caused COVID-19 to spread globally and kill over 593,000 Americans.
During the onset of the deadly pandemic, former President Trump called COVID-19 the "Chinese virus" or the "China virus," which the mainstream media called "racist." The 45th President of the United States explained that he called COVID-19 so "because it comes from China. It's not racist at all. It comes from China, I want it to be accurate."
Accurate, the former president was, as this year the U.S. State Department has found new evidence that the China virus may have started from the Wuhan virology lab. According to the report, COVID-19 may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where researchers who worked there experienced "symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses" as early as autumn of 2019.
This would explain why China raised the alarm on the last day of the year and just three months later, the people all over the world were forced to stay home and businesses had no choice but to shut down.
In May, WIV director Wang Yanyi admitted that the laboratory housed three live strains of bat coronavirus but denied that COVID-19 indeed originated from their virology lab. But by then, so many people had gotten infected and more perished from the China virus. According to BBC, the Chinese Communist Party was offended by former President Trump calling COVID-19 the "China virus."
"We urge the US to correct its mistake and stop its groundless accusations against China,'' the Chinese Communist Party's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at the time. They decried the use of the phrase "China virus," saying it was "racist and xenophobic," pinning the blame on U.S. "politicians' irresponsibility and incompetence" for fearmongering and mishandling of the pandemic.
Just last week, Missouri Representative Brian Seitz was in hot water for calling COVID-19 what it was: the China virus. The Associated Press reported that during a House floor discussion on state revenues and online retailers who don't have a physical store in the state, Republican Rep. Seitz said, "While the zombie apocalypse has seen a shortage of revenue for the state, I remind the body that the Chinese virus has not shut down one business. Government has shut down businesses and created this shortfall."
The Federalist called out the hypocrisy of the mainstream media following the proliferation of COVID-19 variants that have emerged from different locations.
News outlets have long been reporting about the "U.K. variant," "Brazilian variant," and "South African" variant of COVID-19, but nobody condemned them from doing so as much as they decried former President Trump's "China virus" label. The report highlights how these terms are "used acceptedly without the allegation of racism attached by the leftist who made viral terminology about race in the first place."
Historically, viruses are associated with the places they originated from. To forbid anyone from calling COVID-19 the "China virus" just to pacify the Chinese Communist Party, despite overwhelming evidence of mishandling, coverups, and controversy, is simply a violation of free speech.
After all, it's only common practice to name diseases after places or people associated with them, The Federalist noted. For example, there's the Japanese Encephalitis, German Measles, Guinea Worm, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Spanish Flu, and West Nile Virus, to name a few.
