international friends: hereās the deal. South African scientists have been tracking the COVID genomeĀ and keeping an eye out for mutations. Most places in the world arenāt doing so. When we announce a new variant, itās not necessarily fromĀ South Africa, we just publicised the fact that we detected it here. And yet, because weāre a country in the Global South, it doesnāt 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 blacklistedĀ because of it and being prevented from entering other countries and placed on red lists for no reasonĀ
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.
