Never Let A Good Crisis Go To Waste

        As far as I can tell the man who killed six Asian women and two men at three Atlanta massage parlors, Robert Aaron Long, was obsessed with sex, not race. Even so, the fact that the victims were Asian proved too tempting for some media commentators to resist, and they immediately linked the killings to racist attacks on Asian-Americans in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. Many commentators repeatedly blamed the workers' deaths on former president Trump for his repeated references to the "China Virus." Basically, the commentators said, it was wildly racist for anyone to talk about a "China Virus," as, in their words, a virus is a virus is a virus and one's ethnicity has nothing to do with it. 

        That is true, but also beside the point. The virus started in Wuhan, China, perhaps in a life-animal outdoor food market and spread so fast in China that the government halted all flights from Wuhan to other parts of the country in an attempt to contain the spread. The one thing the Chinese government didn't do was stop flights from Wuhan to the United States especially LAX, which might be one reason why southern California has been hit so much harder than other parts of the country.  

        Given that, I can't see how anyone is wrong in calling the virus the Wuhan Virus. There is a long history in epidemiology in referring to viruses by the place where they began. Within the last week, I have read repeatedly about the South African variant, the Brazilian variant, the UK variant, and the California variant. 

        Are these racist too?

        The answer is obviously not. The reason no one complains about them though is that they don't serve the left's contention that the U.S. is an irredeemably racist country. Yes, it is true that the dead workers were all Asian but all the happy ending massage parlors in my neck of Eagle Rock are Asian too. If all the massage parlors in Atlanta were Hungarian or Swedish I suspect Robert Aaron Long would have killed the workers there just as readily. Long was furious because these women worked in the sex trade, not because they came from Asia.