W.H.O ends racism by re-naming virus variants

Breitbart reports that the W.H.O is debuting a new system for naming Coronavirus variants, basing the new system off of the Greek Alphabet.

They believe that rather than referring to the variants as the "British" or "South African" variants that they will avoid the "stigmatizing and discriminatory" practice of naming pathogens by their origin - which might actually convey relevant information.  The new system is relayed below:

Updating this simplified table for the key properties of the major variants with their new @WHO Greek letter names via @mvankerkhove
There is 1 common feature for all: Vaccines Work pic.twitter.com/uGojKKmzoB

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) May 31, 2021

They have a handy yes/no indicator for whether or not vaccines work on the variant listed.  This marker of course won't be abused at all to sell vaccine boosters, hopefully of at least fully approved vaccines.  Bear in mind that the transmissibility and immune evasiveness columns are based fully on models, and only loosely on observed empirical data.

I may have been willing to think these modelers had an idea of what they are doing were it not for literally all of last year.

The new system appears to be a way of making existing viruses appear scarier than they are, especially given that each new "variant" can be only a single genetic marker off of the original.  The ability to measure these things is quite phenomenal, however, the precedent has been set that each new variant - especially vaccine resistant ones (as measured by models) may result in business and life destroying restrictions until vaccination.   

Indeed, despite vaccination, we now see Australia and China returning to lockdown.