May 15, 2025

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Make Every Business

How Omicron Variant Rattled the World in One Week

JOHANNESBURG—Over coffee at his office on Tuesday, Tulio de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation, let a colleague in on a secret.

“There’s something going on,” he told Alex Sigal, a virologist growing coronaviruses at a South African laboratory. “They’ve found a variant they’ve never seen before.”