Page 134 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Chapter Six

Stress Test: The MRC and the Covid-19

Pandemic, 2020–

ike a stress test, a serious pandemic can lay bare key features of societies and
their institutions. Often, in doing so they ruthlessly show up fault lines and
Lshortcomings, sometimes even exacerbating them to the point of breakdown.
For the same reason, however, they can also produce situations which see the strengths
and effective operation of structures clearly demonstrated. In short, pandemics, if
serious, can lift the lid off a society and highlight its inner workings both good and
bad.
For the MRC, the Covid-19 pandemic, which struck South Africa in March 2020
– and has ebbed and flowed since then – provided just such a stress test. How it has
coped with these pressures is the subject of this chapter, though its perspectives are
inevitably limited by the fact that the pandemic is not yet conclusively over. Whether
this chapter might have been more accurately subtitled ‘The MRC and the Covid-19
Pandemic (to be continued)’, only time will tell.
To the emerging Covid epidemic in South Africa the MRC’s response was swift,
strategic and systematic. An online news site spoke of how its president, Glenda Gray,
pivoted the MRC to respond ‘at breakneck speed’. Within a day of the new Minister
1
of Health, Dr Zweli Mkhize, announcing the diagnosis of the first case of Covid-19
in South Africa on 5 March 2020, the MRC began to draw up a preliminary plan of
action to answer the Department of Science and Innovation’s direct question to it,

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