In the routine of Túlio de Oliveira, 45, a Brazilian who played a key role in identifying the omicron variant in South Africa, the many hours spent in laboratories do not impede the exercise of spirituality.
Practically every day, the scientist who has lived in the African country for almost 25 years does yoga and meditation. With long hair that extends beyond her shoulder, she usually works in sandals, and it’s not uncommon for her to show up somewhere barefoot.
In his free time, Oliveira enjoys hiking, where he says he reconnects with nature. He often mentions ubuntu, an African philosophy that preaches solidarity and compassion between human beings and the environment.
These are characteristics that he brings from the cradle. “His parents were hardcore hippies, they were all loose animals”, says his friend Vitor Hugo Szortyka, who has known him since he was a teenager, when they studied at Colégio Marista Champagnat, in Porto Alegre (RS).
“Túlio was very interested in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics. He used to skate in English, he still has a lot of accent, even though he has been away for so long”, says Szortyka, currently living in Sweden, where he works for a software company.
Born in Brasília, Oliveira had a nomadic childhood across several states, accompanying his father, a Rio engineer, and his mother, an architect born in São Tomé and Príncipe, an archipelago colonized by the Portuguese in West Africa.
The family ended up settling in the city of Rio Grande do Sul, which explains the accent, the support for Internacional-RS and the difficulty in giving up meat consumption, despite the alternative lifestyle.
“He had a high IQ and was kind of eccentric. He smoked marijuana, was a skateboarder, at that time he was already hairy,” says Marcelo Zanotto, another friend from high school, now working as a designer in Porto Alegre.
“He was always very intelligent, but he was never CDF. I arrived at school and didn’t even know there was going to be a test, then I took a classmate’s notebook, took a quick look and got a good grade”, says Zanotto.
Today, the scientist’s relaxed manner coexists with an iron discipline in the activity that projected him into the scientific world, virus sequencing. On the 25th, it was Oliveira who alerted the South African government that a new variant of the pathogen that causes Covid-19 had been identified.
The news generated global shock waves within hours, leading to the decision of several countries, including Brazil, to ban flights from South Africa and its neighbors.
The reaction led Oliveira to protest against what he saw as discrimination and injustice. “I don’t see how other developing countries are going to share information like we did, given the backlash against South Africa. […] This makes me angry,” he told the American magazine New Yorker.
Folha asked for an interview with the Brazilian scientist, but there was no response from him or his staff.
Graduated in biotechnology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), he arrived in South Africa in 1997, when his mother went to work there. Since then, he built his career in the country, which he adopted as a home. He currently lives near Durban on the east coast.
His wife and three children are South Africans, and before the pandemic he used to come to Brazil sporadically to visit relatives or attend some academic event.
In the African country, Oliveira completed his master’s and doctoral studies in the area of biosciences at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN). He also won scholarships at British institutions.
He began to study the AIDS virus, a disease that is highly prevalent on the African continent, and to publish studies in prestigious specialized journals, such as Nature. He also dedicated himself to researching the so-called arboviruses, diseases transmitted by insects such as Zika.
In 2017, the Brazilian founded a center linked to the UKZN to analyze the genomic structure of viruses. As he said at the time, one of the goals was to build a research unit that owed nothing to the best scientific centers in the world, in order to stop the “brain drain” from the country to Europe or the USA.
When Covid-19 hatched, he and his team were a natural choice to participate in efforts to monitor the evolution of the coronavirus in the country.
His informal personality, friends say, helped him to attract talent and, above all, resources for the undertaking.
Oliveira has a direct line to the top echelon of the South African government, which finances part of his research. It was he who personally communicated to President Cyril Ramaphosa about the omicron.
He also gets funding from multilateral institutions like the European Union, in addition to not being afraid to ask for money directly from billionaires like Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) or Warren Buffett (Berkshire), who are used to bookmarking on social networks.
One of its sponsors is the Chinese-born South African billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, from the pharmaceutical sector, with an estimated fortune of US$ 8 billion.
“Túlio always seeks to attract professionals from different parts of the world to work with. As we have a high level of publication [em periódicos especializados], we got financing from abroad, and with that we can buy state-of-the-art equipment and inputs, which generates more research”, says Vagner Fonseca, a researcher from Bahia who has worked with Oliveira since 2015, traveling between Brazil and South Africa.
The virtuous circle has borne fruit. In September, Oliveira opened a new structure in the country, Ceri (Center for Response to Epidemics and Innovation), which defines itself as a consortium of scientists and health authorities. In all, there are around 50 people working under the Brazilian command.
Fonseca, who is linked to the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and has been in Brazil since the beginning of November, participated at a distance in the work that led to the discovery of the omicron.
“We have a genomic surveillance program. Every Monday, samples of the Covid virus collected in different parts of South Africa are brought in for sequencing in the laboratory, so we are able to identify any new pattern or change very quickly,” he says. he.
Oliveira’s team began to suspect something was wrong when cases began to grow exponentially in early November in some of the country’s main population centers, particularly in Gauteng province, South Africa’s economic heartland.
“When you see that the pandemic is relatively under control and the number of cases starts going up all of a sudden, it’s because something has come up,” he said.
The first suspicion, he says, was that it was a re-emergence of the delta, a variant that first appeared in India and spread across South Africa. “We were hoping for a re-emergence of the delta. But it was actually the new omicron”, claims.
With the new strain, cases of contamination in South Africa have multiplied. They went from 500 to 5,000 in the seven-day moving average.
On the other hand, says Fonseca, admissions are still relatively low, which could mean that omicrons are highly transmissible but not more aggressive.
The effectiveness of vaccines is also still open. “We are doing tests, to see if there is a vaccine escape. It will probably be necessary to adapt vaccines that use messenger RNA [Pfizer e Moderna]”.
Since the discovery was announced, Oliveira has been working at a ceaseless pace, holding meetings with health authorities and scientists from various institutions, to monitor and predict the patterns of omicron dissemination.
This does not prevent him from being very active on social networks, where he has asked the world to remove travel restrictions to South Africa. He uses as arguments the fact that only then will the country and the African continent be able to receive vaccines and supplies necessary for the continuation of research on the variant.
“Border restrictions prevent nations from alerting the world to future variants. They also delay urgent research because few planes carrying cargo, including products needed for sequencing, are arriving in South Africa,” he wrote on Thursday. .
Fonseca says that, despite this, he is betting that his boss will be able to manage the frustration without it hindering his work. “I’ve never seen Tulio nervous, Tulio angry. He’s always laughing.”
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