It's quite amusing that there was such a push at the start of the pandemic to not call it Chinese Flu or Wuhan Flu, but the British, South Africa, India and Brazil strains all caught on quickly in the media.
So a geographic label was widely used before Biden without apparently causing ructions. It was adopted because the released name for the variant, lineage B.1.1.7, was less convenient or distinctively memorable for the public. If it had been repeatedly referred to as the "Kentish virus" by senior politicians then a similarly hostile reaction might have been seen as was for "Chinese virus".