The so-called British and Indian variants of covid-19 have gotten name changes under new guidance released by the World Health Organisation on Monday. The British variant will now be called “Alpha” and the mutant variant first identified in India will be called “Delta” as the WHO tries to stop stigmatization of regions that were the first to sequence those new variants of coronavirus.
The new naming system uses the Greek alphabet, for the WHO’s Variants of Interest (less serious) and Variants of Concern (more alarming). The variants are given names in the order they’re first identified by the group.
The Indian variant, known by scientists as B.1.617.2, has been dubbed the Delta variant. The so-called South African variant, known by scientists as B.1.351, is now called the Gamma variant.
The British variant, identified as B.1.1.7 by scientists, is now called the Alpha variant. Interestingly, the British actually refer to their variant as the “Kent” variant after the place in the UK where it was found, which explains just how arbitrary these names can be.
The long series of numbers and letters will still be used by scientists, but there were concerns about the regional names and the incentives in place when terms like “British variant” are used.
As the New York Times explains:
Scientists worry that those informal nicknames can be both inaccurate and stigmatizing, punishing countries for investing in the genome sequencing necessary to sound an alarm about new mutations that may well have emerged somewhere else.
Whether the Greek letters will stick is another matter. It has been months since experts convened by the W.H.O. began discussing the issue, allowing labels like “the British variant” and “the South African variant” to proliferate in the news media.
None of this style of reshuffling is new, even when it comes to covid-19. If you remember early 2020, the disease went by a bunch of different names, both formally and informally, including the “novel coronavirus,” 2019-nCoV, the Wuhan Virus, and SARS-CoV-2. It was eventually given the most widely used name, covid-19, in mid-February of 2020.
Names like the Wuhan Virus, while initially used in media reports in an innocuous manner, were later weaponised by far-right figures such as former U.S. president Donald Trump to turn the disease into a racist weapon of the New Cold War.