A tweet claims WHO skipped a letter of the Greek alphabet when designating new COVID-19 variants to avoid using "xi".
News of new Nu variant, but WHO is jumping the alphabet to call it Omicron, so they can avoid Xi.
Is there any information why it was skipped?
Can it be verified that the letter "Xi" was skipped for political reasons, to avoid the connection to the Chinese president Xi Jinping?
Yes, according to a reporter for the Telegraph:
A WHO source confirmed the letters Nu and Xi of the Greek alphabet had been deliberately avoided. Nu had been skipped to avoid confusion with the word "new" and Xi had been skipped to "avoid stigmatising a region", they said.
The New York Times names a WHO spokesman the paper quotes:
“‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new,’” Tarik Jasarevic, a W.H.O. spokesman, said on Saturday. “And ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name.”
He added that the agency’s best practices for naming diseases suggest avoiding “causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.”
My guess is that they would equally have skipped "Putin" or "Obama" if such letters existed.
Yes (to avoid confusion and offence), as confirmed in a statement by the WHO to The Associated Press:
In a statement provided to the AP, the WHO said it skipped nu for clarity and xi to avoid causing offense generally.
“‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new,’ and ‘Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name,” the WHO said, adding that the agency’s “best practices for naming disease suggest avoiding ‘causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups.’”
