Does India Deny the Existence of “Indian Variant” of COVID-19?

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On May 28, Facebook user Shore Shanidze published a post stating that India denies the existence of an “Indian Variant”. Shanidze provides two links in the comments as evidence of the claim.

 

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Shore Shanidze’s claim alleging that India denies the existence of an “Indian Variant” is not true. In the links she provided, the topic of discussion is India protesting the name “Indian” given to the new variant that spread inside the country, however, it doesn’t deny that the new variant exists.

Even though Shore Shanize provides two links in the comments of the post as evidence, neither of them corresponds to the claim of the post. One of the links contains the statement from the Ministry of Health of India stating that even though the World Health Organization has not classified the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus as  “Indian Variant”, several media outlets used this term. The statement noted that the word “Indian” isn’t used in the WHO report, however, the Health Ministry of the country doesn’t deny the existence of the B.1.617 variant in this statement.

The second link that Shore Shanidze provided in the comment section is an article from the British publication “The Guardian”. The article is about India ordering the removal of content, which uses the term “Indian Variant”. In the article, it’s written that the B.1.617.1 (previously called B.1.617) variant of coronavirus was first detected in India last year and after it spread to more than 30 countries, “Indian Variant” has become a widely used term. According to the article, the Electronics and Information Technology Ministry of India ordered social media companies to remove information referring to “Indian Variant”. According to the letter, the World Health Organization has not associated B.1.617.1 variant with a specific country, and thus, calling it “Indian” is misleading. Neither the article nor the letter mentions India denying the existence of the B.1.617.1 variant.

Moreover, the Indian government ordered Twitter and Facebook to remove content from their platform, where they are criticized for the shortcomings in their handling of the virus.

According to the May 30 data, in total 27 894 800 people were infected with coronavirus in India.  According to the official data, a total number of 325 998 people died of the virus in the country. More than half of overall death cases took place at the end of May when the new wave of the virus outbreak started inside the country. One of the reasons why the Indian government faces harsh criticism is the shortcomings of the vaccination process. For example, COVID-19 vaccination of people under the age of 45 was halted in the capital Delhi from May 22 due to vaccine shortage.

For more information about the new wave of coronavirus in India, read the article prepared by “Myth Detector”:

It’s noteworthy that other variants are also referred by the country names. For example, the UK variant (B.1.1.7), Brazil variant (P.1), and South Africa variant (B.1.351), which is associated with the first country where the COVID-19 variants were detected. Despite the fact that the World Health Organization reports don’t use the aforesaid names, the information on the WHO webpage indicates the locations where the variants were first detected. In the World Health Organization reports, India is indicated as the first place where the variant B.1.617 was detected. As it’s mentioned in The Guardian’s article, the Indian government itself often uses the term “UK Variant”.

Similar to India, China also had the same objection at the beginning of the pandemic, when the country protested the use of “Chinese Virus” and “Wuhan Virus” to refer to the virus. However, it is important to emphasize that India’s, as well as China’s refusal were only related to the name of the virus being associated with the countries and they have not denied the existence of the virus and its variants.


The article has been written in the framework of Facebook’s fact-checking program. You can read more about the restrictions that Facebook may impose based on this article via this link. You can find information about appealing or editing our assessment via this link.

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Violation: Disinformation
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