Page 135 - 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

‘What’s your research strategy for Covid?’
Aware that the disease was likely to engulf the country as it was already doing,
frighteningly, in China, Italy and the US, the MRC initially targeted the most
urgent issues of diagnosing, characterizing and treating it before giving attention to
measuring and mitigating its wider social impact, though in practice the two phases
often overlapped. Countering the encroaching pandemic required the decks to be
cleared quickly so that all hands could be mobilized on them.
Its finances substantially enhanced by emergency funding rapidly provided by
three government departments and the private sector and by its own savings as a
result of the cancellation of research travel because of the comprehensive national
lockdown from 27 March 2020, the MRC called on all of its research units to put
forward proposals falling within the broad parameters of its response plan. It did not
take most long to recognize that the looming crisis offered rare research possibilities.
One reported enthusiastically that it ‘seized the research opportunities created by
pioneering … studies for the benefit of South Africa and the global population’, while
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another expressed satisfaction at how it was ‘able to rapidly pivot its research focus
onto COVID-19 research’. Well might a third unit director quote Benjamin Franklin’s
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maxim ‘Out of adversity comes opportunity’. Not surprisingly, verbs like ‘repurpose’,
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‘adapt’ and ‘realign’ appear often in the MRC’s annual reports covering these years.
Diagnosing Covid-19 was clearly fundamental to addressing the pandemic, which
is why the MRC gave primacy to enlarging South Africa’s capacity to test for the
disease more speedily, accurately and extensively. To this end it drew on the experience
of its HIV Prevention Research Unit in HIV testing to formulate protocols for point-
of-care Covid-19 testing, and on lateral thinking by the Centre for TB Research at
Stellenbosch University to support the creation (as in several other laboratories across
the world) of a smartphone app which could distinguish a Covid-19 cough from other
coughs and so use this as a diagnostic tool for the disease.
In addition, it used its contacts with the local pharmaceutical industry to secure a
bigger supply of the reagents required for successful chemical testing, its know-how
in laboratory management to streamline the recording and registration of test results,
and its influence over laboratories run by both its intra- and extramural units to ease
the intense pressure on the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) to carry out
Covid-19 tests by arranging for the use of their own laboratories to conduct more such
tests. Consequently, in terms of its Surge Testing Initiative, nearly 40,000 Covid-19
tests were performed at these laboratories on behalf of the NHLS.
A rather different marker of incidence of the disease – communal rather than
individual – was the MRC’s state-of-the-art polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing

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