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Jan 3, 2022 - Economy & Business

Omarion makes an Omicron comeback

Courtenay Brown
Omarion performing

Omarion performs in 2021 in Atlanta, Ga. Photo: Prince Williams/Wireimage

Musician Omarion wants you to know he's definitely not the Omicron variant.

Driving the news: Memes have been using his name to refer to the most contagious strain of the virus.

  • "My lawyers asked me to read this ... I, Omarion, am a musician and entertainer — you knew that — not a variant, OK," he joked on TikTok this weekend.

The artist's brand is the latest to become connected to the pandemic.

  • The last was Delta Airlines, whose CEO refused to refer to the Delta variant by that moniker. "We just call it the variant," he told WSJ.
  • There was also Corona beer, which saw a flood of misinformation around a link to the coronavirus. (But sales didn't take a hit because of that.)

The bottom line: Omarion hasn't been name-dropped this much since the early 2000s — and he's using the attention to plug his craft: You don't need "a negative test result in order to dance to my music," the singer said.

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