Indian Govt asks social media platforms to remove content referring to "Indian Variant" of Coronavirus

On Friday, the India's information technology (IT) ministry wrote a letter to all social media companies and asked them to take down any content that refers to an "Indian Variant" of the Coronavirus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on May 11 told that, Coronavirus variant B.1.617 was first identified in India last year and later classified it as a variant of global concern.

A day later, the Indian Government issued a statement saying media reports using the term "Indian Variant" were without any basis and that WHO had classified the variant just as B.1.617 .

• "This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of COVID-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO has not associated the term "Indian Variant" with the B.1617 variant of the coronavirus in any of it's reports" stated the letter which is not public.

In their Defence, WHO said "WHO does not identify viruses or variants with names of countries they are first reported from. We refer to them by their scientific names and request all to do the same for consistency."