WITH the World Health Organization (WHO) announcing a new COVID-19 variant named Omicron, netizens questioned the health agency on why variant of concern (VOC) was not named Xi instead.
User Keith Burgin echoed Benny’s sentiments, adding:
Netizen Groovy Tony stated: Yea. They (scared) of Xi, they don’t wanna cause further disturbance with China.
Recently, the South African health experts discovered a new VOC named Omicron, which was heavily mutated and is more transmissible compared to other COVID-19 variants.
The discovery set alarm bells across the globe, with stocks plummeting and nations such as the US, Canada, Israel and Hong Kong banning travels to and from several countries in Africa.
It is note that the WHO has been naming new variants based on the Greek alphabets. Based on that, it seemed that the global health agency had skipped the alphabet Xi, to name the new VOC as Omicron instead.
White nationalist movements across the US and Europe has been alleging that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan, China. However, China, led by its president Xi Jinping, had dismissed the claims and insisted that the coronavirus came from a wildlife market there instead.
Skip the conspiracy theory people!
On that note, user Munni alleged that by skipping the alphabet Xi, it showed that the WHO was under China’s thumbs.
However, not everyone was jumping into the conspiracy theorist bandwagon as user Jack Fruit shared that WHO had skipped several Greek alphabets in the past, such as Nu, for practical reasons. – Nov 27, 2021.
