You don't remember when the sitting president called it "kung flu"[1]? I don't need a newspaper to see the xenophobia in that.
That's xenophobic... how?
Put another way: it takes our laziest view of a ethnicity and uses it to make light of a disease that we think came from there, one that everybody is unhappy about. It doesn’t take much to see the latent xenophobia in that.
Also, it's worth actually reading up on why we called it the Spanish Flu: our allies in WWI originally called it the "American Flu," but changed it to avoid offending us.
Edit: it's also worth nothing that (1) "Kung Flu" is significantly different in content from "Spanish Flu," and (2) it doesn't have to be the case for anyone to be offended for xenophobia to be wrong.
TIL that there were "German measels", in Germany we just called them "measels".
In other words, it's not German and it's not measles. Hopefully a lesson in using this naming pattern for diseases...
The current issue aside, racists and xenophobes basically always attempt to evade responsibility by claiming they were "only joking". Such claims should be tossed in the trash bin where they belong. First, it's not a joke, and it's not funny. Second, they're lying...they didn't intend it as a "joke" and don't really even understand what a "joke" actually is, for the most part. And third, it's not relevant whether it was a joke or not.
The west sucked this up and any mention of china in any capacity got you called racist.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China's premier virology research lab, its first biosafety level 4 lab, and one of the very few (or only one?) that was doing gain-of-function research. Wuhan has a population of 12M, which is just under 1% of China's population.
The fact that the virus emerged there, of all places in China, is non-conclusive but highly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
So I would say, yes, you are looking at this wrong. Saying, "Well you were right but you couldn't possibly have known because you had insufficient information" is tantamount to believing "no one could possibly draw correct conclusions from less data than I could". Hopefully it's clear why that is wrong.
I'm not a big fan of lesswrong, but here's a pretty influential essay on the extreme version of the phenomenon of drawing conclusions from apparently insufficient data, and how it isn't just coincidence: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s....
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that everyone who believed this theory is more intelligent. That would be the most absurd thing of all! What I am saying however is that you can't distinguish between the people who believed it because they performed a (very!) minor Einsteinian feat and those who believe it just because they were told and like the theory. But you're better off not going around and calling them all racist or saying they all just guessed, because at least in some cases that isn't true, and would be anti-intellectual.
Most relevant paragraph from link:
"Of course, Einstein did turn out to be right. I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong."
To be fair, at the time it was know that the Wuhan lab it was one of the leading two labs in the world working with bat and pangolin coronaviruses. They were genetically engineering and combining them and testing them in animal models. One of the primary investigations was modifying proteins so that they can infect hosts using human ACE2 pathway.
In the beginning it had a very xenophobic after taste, at least what laypeople were sharing on social media.
To be clear, I don't care much if it came from a lab. I'd probably even prefer it at least then we can do something about it and avoid it going forward rather than this being a random nature thing that could happen again at any time.