Thread by @miamalan

[Thread] 1. Selective #Omicron travel bans with no scientific justification are harmful. They fuel the stigmatisation of affected countries. Infectious disease studies = clear: discrimination leads to inequality and inequality to the spread of disease.
bit.ly/3lKHhcv

2. Western countries’ #Omicron travel bans on #Africa has resulted in discrimination. The Spanish Tribuna Albaceta published a cartoon of a ‘SA’ boat named Omicron filled with black Africans depicted as viruses, approaching the European shore.

3. Stigma has also emerged in the German media. The newspaper Die Rheinpfalz introduced Omicron as “the virus from Africa".

4. When people = stigmatised they feel less comfortable 2 be transparent because they could be punished for it. They're therefore less open about their disease status, e.g. #COVID + less likely to use health services. This leads to the spread of disease. bit.ly/3lKHhcv

5. SA was transparent about the detection of the #OmicronVariant. But it got slapped with travel bans and stigmatised. Other countries who discover new variants could now be less likely to report the variants because the same thing could happen to them.

https://twitter.com/miamalan/status/1463850194932543490

6. The travel ban on SA has reduced the nr of passenger flights. The team who detected #Omicron in SA now struggle to get hold of reagents to sequence genomes that will help them keep track of Omicron.

https://twitter.com/Tuliodna/status/1465678887074115590

7. Canada refuses to accept the results of SA's PCR #COVID tests. That stigmatises SA for no reason. Because of #HIV SA has one of the best developed (likely better than Canada’s) PCR testing networks in the world (the same technique is used for HIV viral load testing).

8. Despite the SA gov, scientists and the WHO labelling selective #Omicron travel bans as racist, unscientific and counterproductive, no high-income country has reversed their ban. bit.ly/3dtNghh

9. Prejudice against Africa didn’t start with #Omicron. The power balances and discrimination that #COVID19 has exposed have been there for centuries in the form of colonalisation and the consequences thereof that have divided the world into haves and have nots.

10. In 2001 Africa didn't have the ARVs the western world used. The then USAID chief justified the agency’s opposition 2 funding #ARVs 4 Africans by arguing they wouldn’t be able 2 adhere 2 the treatment as they didn’t “know what watches and clocks are”. bit.ly/3DzM2vA

11. Within a few years after Africans had started to use #ARVs, mostly funded by aid including that provided by the US government, studies proved that Africans were in fact better than North Americans with adhering to their treatment. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16896111/

12. Had the US government acted on the prejudice of its aid agency chief, #Africa would have forgone one of the most effective chronic treatments in the world. (The US later became one of the largest donors of #ARVs to Africa). bit.ly/3Iz2tvJ

13. Late access to treatment and punitive measures such as #Omicron travel bans fuel inequality and do the opposite of what scientists, including those in developed nations, say will end #COVID19: access to vaccines and equal treatment for all. bit.ly/3Iz2tvJ

14. Inequality blocks progress, and unless we start to look at one another as human beings with equal rights and worth, the North consciously changes its behaviour, and the South asserts its rights, we won’t contain #COVID19, or any of the pandemics that await us. #OmicronVariant

15. Blaming each other for #Omicron isn’t going to take us anywhere good. @paimadhu encapsulates it aptly: "It’s humans against a viral pandemic. Not humans against humans. Stop racialising variants.”

https://twitter.com/paimadhu/status/1467827962246578184?s=20

16. Read my full article about the unjustified, counterproductive #OmicronVariant travel bans on #Africa here: bit.ly/3lKHhcv