Coetzee was approached by European “scientists” after she had explained that the panic surrounding Omicron was a “storm in a teacup”. Soon after her statement, the Dutch chairman of the OMT (the health agency dealing with the pandemic in the Netherlands) Jaap van Dissel dismissed her observations by saying that it was “really too early” to tell.

“You don’t know yet what new variants are going to emerge after Omicron,” Van Dissel said.

Even when Coetzee had tried to explain that she had simply been following the WHO guidelines for the definition of a mild disease, politicians continued to...