Page 142 - 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–

Even so, she remained a member of the National Department of Health’s
Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) for the Covid-19 pandemic, to which she
had been appointed in her personal capacity, and chair of its research subcommittee,
positions which allowed her to voice her own opinions in these influential forums. By
extension, these views were widely seen to be those of the MRC too, raising its public
profile appreciably as a result. Her words were its words.
Ever since the AIDS denialism controversy, Gray had prided herself on
unflinchingly speaking scientific truth to power. ‘The moment we see that we’ve gone
off kilter or that something is amiss,’ she told a journalist in May 2020, ‘we need to be
able to say, “Hey, maybe that looked like a good idea last week, but things are different
this week.” You have to be able to stand up and say, “Things are not right,” and make
sure that they’re addressed and get focused on … If we have influence and we keep
quiet then that is bad.’ 15
Driven by this forthright, straight-talking philosophy, in the midst of the mounting
Covid-19 epidemic in South Africa Gray did not hesitate to call out problems she
perceived in the state’s strategies against it and their unanticipated, deleterious

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) instruction for traditional healers at Bushbuckridge,
Mpumalanga, led by Ms Sizzy Ngobeni (wearing blue top) from the MRC-Wits Rural
Public Health and Health Transition Research Unit, August 2021. Learning how to don
protective gloves under her eye are three traditional healers, (left to right) Ms Orlinda
Ngomane, Mr Wilson Mhlongo and Ms Aidah Mabunda.

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