What kind of troglodyte would create a racism-deploring twitter poster using these ludicrous dayglo colors? (Alyssa Milano posted it, but I can’t believe she designed the art…I mean, good effing GOD.) The way to present this message, obviously, is to do it Woody Allen-style — white Windsor Light font against a black background.

At the same time, a certain distinction. Yes, it does seem vaguely racist to call COVID-19 a “Chinese virus”, as the coronavirus is obviously international at this stage. And yet there’s no denying that the virus is widely believed to have originated in a open-air wildlife market in Wuhan, and specifically from bats. That’s not racism — that’s almost certainly what happened.

Nor is it racist to acknowledge that the Ebola virus partly originated in Yambuku (Democratic Republic of the Congo), “a village near the Ebola River from which the disease takes its name.” Or to say that the Zika virus came “from the Ziika Forest of Uganda, where the virus was first isolated in 1947.” Or to say that the West Nile virus “was discovered in Uganda in 1937 and was first detected in North America in 1999.”

Nor is it an anti-white-people legend to state that Lyme disease “was diagnosed as a separate condition for the first time in 1975 in Old Lyme, Connecticut.”