Whatever happened to the Botswana scientist who identified omicron? He caught it!
Sikhulile Moyo, the laboratory director at the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute and a research associate with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, headed the team that identified the omicron variant.Sikhulile Moyo, the laboratory director at the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute and a research associate with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, headed the team that identified the omicron variant.
There was a global awakening. Those events around the omicron discovery showed us the triumph of science but the failure of global health policy. Has your work changed because of this discovery — are you and your lab collaborating more with scientists around the world? What is unique about southern Africa, especially Botswana and South Africa, is the ability to detect these variants in near real-time because of the pathogen genomic sequencing that has been established [examining DNA to identify it or see if it's changing]. We think it's not that they are not circulating elsewhere, but it's just that maybe we are looking deeper.
We're even thinking beyond COVID. We are preparing ourselves to be able to adapt for pathogen discovery. If a [new] outbreak happens, we should be able to quickly check within 24 to 36 hours what it is.. What does that mean moving forward? It may get a little bit rough. Many people are spending days at home and [developing] long COVID afterward.Research, training and development cost a lot of money, but as cases go down, people forget that we need to make sure these systems are sustained.
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