Page 140 - 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–

of Antimicrobial Resistance revealed that KN 95 masks offered insufficient protection
to front-line health-care workers, who, accordingly, needed additional protection. This
recommendation the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority included
in its revised masking regulations. On its part the Health Systems Research Unit
reviewed mask-wearing regulations and screening practices at the country’s border
posts; as a result, the College of Public Health Medicine in South Africa stiffened its
guidelines so as to reduce the risk of infection at these locations.
Until vaccines became available incrementally from February 2021, the state’s chief
preventive strategy hinged on non-pharmaceutical interventions like strict lockdowns,
masking, social distancing and hand sanitation, which the MRC went along with, with
the aim of slowing down the tide of Covid-19 cases swamping hospitals. Gray herself
was unenthusiastic about very tight lockdowns, preferring instead intensive testing
and tracing. However, she recognized that at that point a lockdown was ‘a foregone
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conclusion. Whatever we said [against it] was not going to be heard.’

Dr Bhavna Gordhan, a senior researcher in the MRC-supported DSI/NRF Centre of
Excellence for Biomedical TB Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, harvesting
the Covid-19 virus grown in the high-biosafety laboratory there in May 2020 to use in
diagnostic tests country-wide. Her colleague in this, Professor Bhavesh Kana, admitted that
‘My hand was shaking as we pipetted our first harvest of the live virus’.

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