Page 138 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Stress Test: The MRC and the Covid-19 Pandemic, 2020–

one of his prime ‘places that do not form silos, but that can work together to answer
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the big health questions’.
In the complementary area of therapeutics, one aspect of MRC support was also
offered at arm’s length, namely a R1 million contribution to each of two international
clinical trials partly conducted in South Africa, firstly of a purported Covid-19 antidote,
chloroquine, and secondly of several anti-viral drugs said to improve outcomes in
serious hospitalized cases of the disease. In all cases the claims of their efficacy were
shown by the trials to be invalid.
Far more direct in confronting the disease was the MRC’s role in securing an anti-
Covid-19 vaccine as the pandemic entered its second year, initially for the country’s
health-care workers whose occupation put them most at risk of contracting it, but
subsequently for a widening circle of the general adult population. The process took
place with dramatic speed.
When in February 2021 a clinical trial (to which the MRC had contributed R10
million) of the Oxford AstraZeneca anti-Covid-19 vaccine intended for rollout in South
Africa showed that it was a poor preventive against the Beta variant then dominant in
the country, Glenda Gray responded to Mkhize’s enquiry about an alternative vaccine
with characteristic drive. Using her personal connections, she rapidly managed to
secure 500,000 doses of the far more efficacious Johnson & Johnson anti-Covid-19
vaccine from the manufacturer in Belgium to replace the AstraZeneca vaccine. As
the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had already been trialled in the ENSEMBLE study
in South Africa thanks to Gray’s insistence, it was possible to write the necessary
protocol quickly and fast-track approval for research purposes of the so-called Sisonke
Research Study by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority. ‘Sisonke’
means ‘we are all together’ in isiZulu.
On 17 February 2021 the rollout of this vaccine began for health-care workers
at the Khayelitsha District Hospital. Among the special additional recipients were
Mkhize and President Cyril Ramaphosa, who expressly congratulated the MRC ‘for
responding so rapidly and effectively to this challenge’. It was ‘an example of what
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was possible when political will, science, hard work and a strong desire to act come
together’, enthused the research study’s team of organizers. In the next 18 months
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almost 500,000 health workers were vaccinated with it once and 230,488 of these
twice. Along with this, studies of the vaccine’s safety and efficacy proved markedly
positive, opening the way for rolling it out to other essential workers in the country
and in eSwatini too, in what the MRC justifiably described as an ‘extraordinary and
unparalleled’ programme in terms of its scale and speed of delivery. In addition, it
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also undertook to assist in the research and development required to produce mRNA
vaccines locally, a first in Africa. Exuberantly, a colleague of Gray’s publicly described
her as ‘the closest thing South Africa has to a Tony Fauci’.
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