The United Kingdom has removed a ban on travellers from Zambia and 10 other African countries in a move seen as a reaction to widespread criticism of alleged discriminatory and “unscientific” responses by the West to the recent emergence of a new COVID-19 variant.
UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced on Tuesday that Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe would from Wednesday morning no longer be the red list, which was reintroduced in late November as a precaution after the emergence of the Omicron variant.
He said the decision to remove these countries from the list was taken on realisation that the variant was no longer confined to the 11 nations but was available across the world.
“Now that there is community transmission of Omicron in the UK and Omicron has spread so widely across the world, the travel red list is now less effective in slowing the incursion of Omicron from abroad,” Javid said in a statement.
The travel ban has been criticized for being a harsh decision which was not backed by scientific evidence.
Some observers felt that the African countries were being punished for alerting the world to the existence of the more transmissible Omicron variant, which had ironically already been detected in some Western nations way before South Africa announced that it had discovered the new strain.
JN/APA