When the Paris Peace Forum nonprofit began working on pandemic preparedness to support the global health community's efforts in the COVID-19 response, they discovered a “profound and entirely understandable sense of injustice” expressed by the scientists in Botswana and South Africa who identified the omicron variant.
“They had discovered and provided the world with the knowledge and data to combat these pathogens, yet they were the last to access medical products deriving from their discovery,” said Gabriel Butin, head of global health at the forum. He is also one of the authors of a field study on the lessons from FIFA’s fair benefit-sharing model for global health, conducted in 2022 in Botswana and South Africa.
“There was a fundamental issue with the distribution of the value they created,” Paris-based Butin told Devex of the scientists in an email. The discovery of the omicron variant by Botswana-based virologist Sikhulile Moyo and South Africa-based bioinformatics scientist Tulio de Oliveira sparked strict bans on travel to and from southern Africa in the West, and they even received death threats.