The United States praised South Africa on Saturday for its “transparency” with the rest of the world upon the discovery of the Omicron variant, as Pretoria says it feels “punished” and unfairly treated, with its citizens treated in persona non grata . In a telephone conversation between the head of US diplomacy Antony Blinken and his South African counterpart Naledi Pandor, “Secretary of State Blinken congratulated South African scientists for the rapid identification of the Omicron variant” of the coronavirus, the State Department said in a statement.
He also praised “the South African government for its transparency in sharing this information, which should serve as a model for the world,” adds American diplomacy. Travel bans issued by many countries for South Africans amount to “punishing South Africa for its advanced genomic sequencing and its ability to detect new variants more quickly,” the South African government lamented on Saturday, two days after the announcement of Omicron’s discovery.
“We are sometimes punished for being transparent and doing things quickly,” regretted South African virology star Tulio de Oliveira, whose team detected the variant. Conversely, the United States accuses Beijing of having waited too long before sharing crucial information on the epidemic, saying that more transparent management could have helped stop the spread of the virus.