Are Origin-based Naming Conventions Racist?

Someone mentioned the fact that naming the 1918 flu pandemic the "Spanish Flu" has been racist for a hundred-and-some-odd years. But it's naming had nothing to do with Spanish people, and everything to do with Spanish media. It had nothing to do with a Spanish person bringing it to the US, but it did have something to do with people in the US thinking--and rightly so at the time--that it came from Spain. 

According to History.com: Spain was one of only a few major European countries to remain neutral during World War I. Unlike in the Allied and Central Powers nations, where wartime censors suppressed news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail. News of the sickness first made headlines in Madrid in late-May 1918, and coverage only increased after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case a week later. Since nations undergoing a media blackout could only read in depth accounts from Spanish news sources, they naturally assumed that the country was the pandemic’s ground zero. The Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus had spread to them from France, so they took to calling it the “French Flu.”

Is it racist to call MERS Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome because the first reported case in 2012 was in Saudi Arabia? Or because it mainly affected the region around the Arabian Peninsula? Maybe it's zoophobic to call MERS camel virus because it's species of origin was camels; or H1N1 being called bird flu or H5N1 being called swine flu for the same reason? 

How is it even logical that referring to something by it's place of origin is racist? Is calling people who come from China Chinese people racist? Of course not; it's a person...who came from China. So how can calling a virus that came from China be racist? It can't be; it's a virus...that came from China. 

The logic--or lack of it, really--that some of y'all follow amazes me, truly.