Lieutenant governor digs in heels on 'Wuhan virus' tweet

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio's lieutenant governor dug in his heels Wednesday on a tweet in which he referred to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus,” even as advocates warn such rhetoric is a driving force behind violence against Asian Americans, including the recent attacks in Georgia and New York.

Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted’s March 26 tweet was the second time in a week that Democratic Sen. Tina Maharath, the first Asian American woman elected to the Ohio General Assembly, heard an elected official call the coronavirus that first emerged in Wuhan, China, the “Wuhan virus,” she said.

Maharath said Husted and others are following the lead of former President Donald Trump, who variously called the virus the “kung flu” and the “China virus."

“When you say those things, such as attach locations or ethnicities to the disease, it creates racial profiling, and then it turns into xenophobic behavior,” Maharath said. “And when leaders with that kind of power repeat those terms in confidence and double down on it, it leads to more hate crimes.”

His intention with the tweet, Husted said in an interview with The Associated Press, was to criticize the Chinese government.

“I was just pointing out that this is an international crisis, in my opinion, that the Chinese government is responsible for and I wanted an independent investigation,” he said. “So I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything that the political left or political right thinks that I might have from that tweet other than to draw attention to the issue.”

The claim that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan has been scrutinized in the past year by health officials, including the leading U.S. infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The claim was further muddied when a draft...