Scientists bicker over what to call coronavirus variants

Repurposing the robin or quail as catchy labels for ungainly mutants would be less confusing for the public, an epidemiologist based in Switzerland had mused. That would appease politicians in member states like South Africa and India who were unhappy with the way ordinary people named new virus strains after the country where they were first discovered: “the South African variant,” “the Indian variant.”

Feathers were ruffled.

“It is almost inevitable that some will mistakenly think the birds carry or are responsible for Covid, putting robins and pelicans at risk the world over,” one commenter on a research paper protested. “If the ‘Robin’ variant takes off, you will be impacting my daughter and every other person named Robin,” complained another.

It’s hard to find a good name for a bad virus. In December, the WHO began brainstorming an easy-to-remember system for naming coronavirus variants that would be acceptable to 190-some member states, and the vast community of scientists who follow, and often nitpick, the agency’s recommendations.

It gave a task force of several dozen virologists, microbiologists and taxonomists from around the world the near-impossible job of all agreeing on one idea. The overriding rule: Variants can’t be named after the place they were found, to avoid stigmatizing countries doing the legwork of identifying virus strains circulating in their populations.

Greek gods—from Apollo to Zeus—were struck down because of trademark concerns, and because those myths were often violent. Using common names—Andrew, Katrina—as is done for hurricanes contravened the agency’s “Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases.” A simple numerical system, where the first variant would be V1, was rejected because V2 was the name of a German rocket used during World War II. VOC1, VOC2, for “variant of concern,” sounded too much like a common swear word. Birds required proficiency in English, so never got much consideration.

“We kept asking, surely you’ve got to have names by now,” said a WHO official. “But the group didn’t have consensus.”

Another proposal for an ornate system of make-believe nouns—Alcanopa, Focanuba—was shot down because “it all sounded a bit like alien names in a science-fiction universe,” said a panelist, Mark Pallen, professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.

The exercise left him impressed with how easily the WHO turned a coronavirus disease from 2019 into “Covid-19,” which seemed wonky at first but proved infectious. “It’s brilliant,” said Prof. Pallen. “Whoever did that was inspired and deserves a medal. Covid was really good.” (A WHO spokesman declined to say who in the organization came up with the name.)

At stake is whether the WHO can solve a problem as old as the plague. Governments big and small fear the consequences of announcing a new disease found on their soil.

The ignominious reward is often having a disease named after a local river—Ebola—town—Lyme—or the nation itself, like Spanish Flu, which virologists say almost certainly came from the U.S. Travel bans, trade restrictions and a host of serious consequences can follow.

After months of regular arguments on reply-all emails piling up at odd hours, many panelists became overwhelmed. Twice, a senior WHO adviser gave the task force 24 hours to reach an agreement, only for the group to blow past the deadline.

“It was basically all these esteemed scientists telling each other their ideas were stupid,” said Jinal Bhiman, a principal medical scientist at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

Last month, they settled on a Greek alphabet-based system that some of the task force’s own members worry still might not serve the intended purpose. Henceforth, governments and media should refer to the variant previously known as the U.K. variant, identified in the county of Kent, as Alpha, while one detected in South Africa is Beta, the WHO announced on May 31. Gamma was the new name for a strain thought to have originated in Brazil, while Delta was one of the variants first found in India. The idea had been sitting on page three of the WHO’s 2015 disease-naming guidelines.

Not everybody was happy. The WHO’s media department received feedback from an aggrieved Greek national demanding to know why the WHO hadn’t chosen the Roman alphabet.

Also, there are only 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, a gamble that the pandemic will subside before it unleashes Omega. Prof. Pallen figures the panelists bought themselves as little as six months, which is about as long as it took to create the system. “Hang on, were all these meetings just for this?” he said.

Greek letters are going out of style with the tiny number of scientists that name natural disasters. In April, the World Meteorological Organization, which had helped advise the WHO, decided to stop naming tropical storms after Greek letters, in part because Zeta, Theta, and Eta sound too similar. That decision took a single afternoon.

“It led to messaging challenges,” said Clare Nullis, a WMO media officer, who had to help French and Spanish news presenters pronounce the “th” in “theta”

A WHO spokesman said the agency was “very pleased” with the adoption of its new labels by the media and the public. “We expect that people will continue to adopt them as they are simple, easy to say and remember,” he said.

Stanley Perlman, a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Iowa, isn’t so sure. Prof. Perlman wasn’t on the task force that named the variants, but he is on the International Committee for the Taxonomy of Viruses that coined SARS-CoV-2, the name of the virus that causes Covid-19.

“It’s hard for me to imagine that when I talk to my neighbor he will say ‘I’m really worried about the Delta variant,” he said. BIGNEWZ