Please see my response to FigNorton.
Why is Chinese virus or Wuhan Flu clearly racist?
Because neither of those names are descriptive of the virus and serve no function than to smear the Chinese people as being unclean and a source of disease.
Because the same people who use the term “China Virus” also think calling it “Kung Flu” is socially acceptable.
Pretty much this. Trump tried to get the racist term to stick even though the virus already had a name. Trump has a history of giving people derogatory names to people he doesn’t like, it’s part of how he operates, and demising China, and the Chinese people fall right into that. The intent behind the China virus was clearly such an attempt that it pretty much fell flat.
The UK variant and the like however has no such raciest or xenophobic intent, and its name is actually helpful to understand the spread.
That’s not scholarly, unless you can show me it’s peer reviewed.
Yes, this, it’s useful to know where the variants are coming from (and I say that as a UKer). Whereas ‘China Virus’, wasn’t ever called that (at the start I heard Covid-19, Coronavirus, and Wuhan Virus). Trump started his China Virus mantra well into the pandemic, which was clearly just a clumsy and racist way of blaming someone else.
For starters, “Chinese virus” would be less racist than “China virus”. It would still be racist, but less.
As with any epithet, it’s all about the originally intended meaning and the history of its usage. “China virus” was used in a derogatory manner almost from the beginning. Trump initially used it as a swipe at the CCCP, but then his supporters began using it and other epithets to suggest that the virus was Chinese or Asian, and to hint that Asians were somehow ‘dirty’ and ‘diseased’
Whenever I see a noun used where an adjective is required, I have a pretty good idea which end of the political spectrum it came from.
Even sometimes from woman politicians!
Is the term ‘China virus’ a dogwhistle suggesting an intentional biological attack?
This article mentions that some people thought it was deliberately released as an attack.
Every attacker starts by shooting themselves you know. 
“China Virus” is racist because there were already universally understood labels for it (COVID-19, Coronavirus). The only reason to relabel it the China Virus is if you have an agenda. There are no universally understood labels for the variants other than the regional ones.
Trump claimed he was trying to emphasize the origin of the virus; this was a short time after China was trying to suggest the virus may have been brought there by US troops.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/trump-china-coronavirus/index.html
Which was bad enough, but he soon also began referring to it as the “Kung Flu”:
This shows that for Trump, calling it the “China Virus” wasn’t about being “accurate” about where the virus came from; it (and the Kung Flu moniker) were about blaming, humiliating, belittling, and dehumanizing Chinese people. It worked really well:
Perfide Albion!
More seriously, think about what happens if a variant comes out of China? Do we call it the China Variant.
This is the concern one gets into when trying to attack societal sins. Once you state that names should follow a rule because they are offensive, you have to decide whether any similar name should be changed, even if it isn’t generally considered offensive. So you either have the rule that there shouldn’t be ANY (geographical) names, or someone has to decide which places are OK to have in the name, and which aren’t.
Some of the reporting is using the more long winded, but much more accurate description of, “the variant first detected in the UK.” I think using that type of phrasing at the beginning of an article, even if followed by shorthand of “UK variant” and “South African variant” is helpful in keeping those terms non-stigmatizing.
It’s also helpful if the people making official designations make them user friendly. I mean, Covid-19 is easy to remember and say, though the name of the virus, SARS-coV-2, a little less so.
No, we call it the Chinese Variant. See the recent thread about the difference between the phrases “Jewish lawyer” and “Jew lawyer”
Then shouldn’t the UK variant be called the British variant? It’s kind of a silly equivalence. There’s plenty of references to the “South Africa variant” along with “South African”. It’s not automatically racist to use the noun.
Agreed, that’s a false equivalency.
Now, “Chinaman Variant” would be totally racist and closer to the “Jew/Jewish” comparison. But I see nothing wrong with “China Variant”.