Page 101 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

Government for increased funding. To the head of a kindred medical research
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institution with whom he interacted, Mbewu appeared reluctant to ‘cause waves’.
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For instance, when the new head of the Diabetes Research Unit clashed irreparably
with his deputy, an appeal to Mbewu to resolve the ongoing problem saw him establish
a second diabetes unit, the Diabetes Discovery Platform, to settle the conflict, thereby
creating a unit for each of the two contending researchers to head. Duplication was
clearly the lesser of two evils to him, even though it made ‘the tree of research …
become shaggy’, as a senior MRC official phrased it. Sooner or later pruning shears
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would be needed.
Yet, what harmed Mbewu’s reputation and standing even more – and thus those of the
MRC too – was his flirtation with Mbeki’s AIDS denialism and the Rath Foundation’s
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AIDS quackery, as discussed earlier. Labels like ‘a yes-man for Mbeki’, a ‘sweetheart
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appointment’, a ‘purely political’ appointment’, and ‘one of the health minister’s
favourite sons’ multiplied in and out of the MRC. Damningly, the high-profile head
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of the Treatment Action Campaign, Zackie Achmat, concluded that, under Mbewu the
MRC ‘is now the site of contestation between science and superstition’. Mbewu’s
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‘cosy relationship with Tshabalala-Msimang and his dissident views on HIV/AIDS
did lasting damage to the MRC’s international reputation’, averred an anonymous
senior member of the MRC.
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Its scientific reputation compromised, its governance in disarray and its financial
base shaky, the MRC stood at a nadir for the second time in less than twenty years.
A post-1994 period which had begun so positively for it ended with it being closely
associated with ‘positive’ in a very different sense – HIV+. As Malegapuru Makgoba
put it dramatically, ‘like Jesus in the wilderness’, the MRC was being severely tested.
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