The Indian government has written to all social media companies to take down all content referring to the Indian variant COVID-19.
The letter was issued by India’s Information Technology Ministry on Friday.
In a Reuters report, the Indian government said that media reports using the term ‘Indian variant’ have no basis. The World Health Organization had only classified the variant as B.1.617.
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The IT ministry said in the letter that social media companies should remove all content that indicates Indian variant content.
“This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of COVID-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO has not associated the term ‘Indian Variant’ with the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports,” the letter said.
A senior Indian official also told Reuters that the letter sends a clear message that using the term Indian variant hurts the country’s image and spreads miscommunication.
The WHO declared B.1.617 also reclassified as a “variant of concern” or a global health threat.
The B.1.617, has been found in preliminary studies to spread more easily than the original virus. There is also some evidence that it may be able to evade some of the protections provided by vaccines.
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“And as such we are classifying this as a variant of concern at the global level,” the WHO said in a briefing.
“Even though there is increased transmissibility demonstrated by some preliminary studies, we need much more information about this virus variant in this lineage in all of the sub lineages, so we need more sequencing, targeted sequencing to be done,” it added.
The WHO is currently monitoring 10 coronavirus variants in the world.