Lambda, Mu ... Omicron? Why the WHO skipped ‘Nu’ and ‘Xi’ to name latest coronavirus variant
- The health body says one is confusing and the other is a common last name
- One critic says the decision reflects the WHO’s fear of the Communist Party
Nu and Xi, the 13th and 14th letters, were next in line.
But in a statement to Associated Press on Saturday, the WHO said: “‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new’, and ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name.”
It said its “best practices for naming disease suggest avoiding causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups”.
On Saturday, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jnr tweeted: “As far as I’m concerned the original [name] will always be the Xi variant.”
Republican Senator Ted Cruz also suggested in a tweet that Omicron’s name showed that the WHO was “scared of the Chinese Communist Party”.
The WHO has faced various accusations that it gave in to pressure from China over the coronavirus, which was first reported from the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December, 2019.
The health body announced its adoption of the Greek alphabet system to describe variants of coronavirus strains in May this year, saying these labels were simple and easy to say and remember. It also noted that associating variants with places was “stigmatising and discriminatory”.
In China, a number of Chinese characters which would be pronounced as “Xi” in different tones are used as surnames.
According to data from the Ministry of Public Security in February, the Chinese president’s surname is the 296th most common family name in the country.
Two other surnames that would also be read as “Xi” but read in different tones were more common, ranking 169 and 228 out of the top 300 surnames in China.