WHO ‘bowed to China’ over new variant name

THE World Health Organisation has been accused of bowing to China by skipping a letter in the Greek alphabet when naming the new Covid variant.

The agency on Friday announced that it would be calling the new strain Omicron – jumping over the letter Xi, which is also the name of China’s premier Xi Jinping.

The WHO said its decision was based on Xi being a ‘common surname’ and to avoid either ‘stigma’ or the risk of causing offence to ‘cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups’.

But critics said the decision provided yet more evidence that the WHO is ‘scared’ of the Chinese Communist Party.

It has already been accused of overseeing a whitewash inquiry into the origins of the pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan and of ignoring evidence suggesting it may have started in a laboratory there.

President Xi is famously thinskinned and is even said to have banned the character Winnie the Pooh in China after critics pointed out his resemblance to the bear.

The WHO began naming new variants after characters in the Greek alphabet rather than by the place in which they emerged in May on the basis that they are ‘easy to pronounce and non-stigmatising labels’.

When the new B.1.1.529 variant was revealed last week, Nu and Xi were the next available letters in the Greek alphabet. The WHO skipped Nu to avoid confusion with the word ‘new’ but also avoided Xi.

Omicron is the fifth mutation to be named as a variant of concern. Other variants – such as Epsilon, Lambda and Mu – were categorised as ‘of interest’ so went largely unnoticed outside the scientific community.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz tweeted: ‘If the WHO is this scared of the Chinese Communist Party, how can they be trusted to call them out the next time they’re trying to cover up a catastrophic global pandemic?’