international friends: here’s the deal. South African scientists have been tracking the COVID genome and keeping an eye out for mutations. Most places in the world aren’t doing so. When we announce a new variant, it’s not necessarily from South Africa, we just publicised the fact that we detected it here. And yet, because we’re a country in the Global South, it doesn’t matter that our scientists are incredible and are doing the world a service by tracking and reporting these things, because our ordinary citizens are being blacklisted because of it and being prevented from entering other countries and placed on red lists for no reason
Thank you for fucking saying this. Here in South Africa we have had to deal with the immense pressure of widespread and practically endemic TB and HIV which has resulted in a world-renowned medical research capacity, specifically in virology and genomics. We found this variant because we were fucking prepared, not because of some deficit of the Global South.
