As some European vehicles recognized in their own headlines, “el miedo” led to the closure of borders for travelers from South Africa, in the utterance of the Spanish El País. In the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in the same direction, no variant “has so spread terror quickly”.
It wasn’t just fear, terror, and panic—another expression often used in coverage. There was also an awareness that the first doses and now the boost, both in the United States and in Europe, had left Africa and other poorer regions of the world in the background, with less immunization.
And now the “alarm clock” has rang in developed nations, in Bloomberg’s phrase, to remind that, “the more time you spend with billions of unvaccinated people, the greater the chance that the virus will mutate into more potent variants.”
It is not yet known whether the strain dubbed the hastily omicron is, in fact, more potent. But one by one the “developed nations” were slamming their doors to South Africa and other countries in the region, in the headlines of the New York Times and Times of London, this Friday (26).
The double punishment, from previously denied vaccines to the now closed borders, has startled the South African government, which has called an online press conference on Friday against a ban on flights out of the country. The health minister described the US and Europe as taking only instinctive, “panic” actions.
And he left a warning in the air, almost to himself: “It’s a risk to divulge what you’ve found.” So did Cape Town’s mayor on radio: “If we’re going to be punished for detecting a variant, we need to know what we’re dealing with before announcing it to the world.”
Politicians echoed South African scientists like Marc Mendelson, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Cape Town, who on Twitter and later speaking to the Financial Times warned of the global effect of this “transparency punishment”.
The Euro-American coverage, having already naturalized the privilege of vaccines for its own, in the last year and a half, paid little attention to the new injustice. Nor is it the first time for South Africa, in fact: When it identified the beta variant in December 2020, the country also found itself on the European veto list.
Africans are not entirely alone. John Brownstein of Harvard, upon learning of the American veto of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and others, commented on Twitter that the move should “undermine the incredible effort to share the data”.
Worse, both Mendelson and Brownstein question whether closing borders slows down propagation. And other scientists, Chinese, joined Mendelson in questioning the greater impact of the variant, according to what is known “until this point”.
Jin Dongyan of the University of Hong Kong told the Global Times that there is still no data showing that omicrons, for example, outperform current vaccines. And immunologist Zhuang Shilihe wrote in Weibo that too many mutations, as it turned out, could even reduce the adaptability of the variant, which would have difficulty overcoming the delta.
The new strain will still be able to show everything that the financial coverage projected, including ending global inflation and containing the rise in interest rates. But for now its victims, barely noticed in the global news, are the populations of Southern Africa.
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