The omicron variant was identified over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and declared a variant by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The way in which omicron was named shows how the WHO has worked to appease the Chinese Communists.
The Hill reports (emphasis added):
“Earlier this year the organization announced it would use letters of the Greek alphabet to name key variants of COVID-19, in order to make it easier to say and remember. It also moves away from stigmatizing a place and groups of people, as earlier variants were referred to based on where they were first identified.
The latest COVID-19 variant name, omicron, actually skipped two letters in the Greek alphabet. The next letter in line was “Nu,” which WHO claimed was not used because it was too similar to the word “new,” according to WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic, who spoke with The New York Times.
After “Nu” would have been “Xi,” which was also not used to name omicron. The reasoning behind that is seemingly more political, as it is also the name of China’s leader Xi Jinping. China is an especially sensitive subject of the pandemic, with the origins of the original COVID-19 strain linked to a wet market in Wuhan, China...
Though WHO did not initially offer an explanation for how it named omicron, Jasarevic told the Times that WHO’s policy requires “avoiding causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional, or ethnic groups.””
As Ted Cruz points out, “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?”
On Fox last night, Tom Cotton said the WHO decision is “pathetic communist bootlicking”.
He said,
“From the beginning Tony Fauci and all these know-it-all public health bureacrats have been more worried about hurting the feelings of their friends in other countries than they have been protecting the American people from the Chinese Communist party and what it did to unleash this plague on the world.
Just look what happened over the weekend, the World Health Organization named the new variant, ‘the Omicron Variant’ because the previous letter in the Greek alphabet Xi is spelled like Xi Jinping’s last name. What pathetic communist bootlicking.”