Page 145 - 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

of the World Health Organization (WHO) about the wisdom of this step and the
outright opposition of the main teachers’ trade union, the South African Democratic
Teachers’ Union (SADTU). On the very day that SADTU expressed its view, Gray
appeared on the SABC TV News to argue the case for schools to reopen. Moreover,
the National Department of Health quickly added this nine-minute interview to its
official coronavirus website. Not by coincidence, soon after this a phased reopening
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of schools was announced. Clearly, the bridge between Gray and Mkhize was being
urgently repaired in a bid to mitigate the impact of a cascade of Covid-19 cases.
It is equally evident that Mkhize did not support the attack later that month by the
Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, on the reports about excess deaths
painstakingly compiled by the MRC’s Burden of Disease Research Unit (BODRU)
and innovatively issued every week, making South Africa one of the few countries in
the world able to track such deaths in near to real time. Alarmingly, these showed likely
Covid-19 deaths to be three times greater than the official death toll from the disease.
While Motsoaledi stormed that these were only ‘mathematical deaths’ which could
not be automatically attributed to Covid-19 and that the MRC was being ‘nefarious’
in publishing them, Gray defended to the hilt her BODRU’s findings, that ‘the timing
and geographic pattern leaves no room for question whether this is associated with
the Covid-19 epidemic’. She argued that accepting the official toll would give South
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Africa one of the lowest death rates globally, making it the ‘laughing-stock of the world
because everyone knows oxygen is in short supply [here]’. With Mkhize pointing
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out that BODRU’s figures as reported by the MRC – which he praised as a ‘robust
academic agency that allows us to comprehensively study the impact of COVID-19’
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– were drawn from a far wider array of sources every week than those compiled by
the official South African Statistics Service (Stats SA) once a month and so might
well be more accurate, Motsoaledi was persuaded to accept a compromise statement
drafted by Gray to ease public anxiety, that the soaring death toll ‘may be attributed to
both COVID-19 deaths as well as non-COVID-19 due to other diseases … as health
services are re-orientated to support this health crisis’. Tellingly, again both the
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SABC TV News and the National Department of Health’s coronavirus portal carried
her statement, convincing the media henceforth to take cognizance of BODRU’s
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excess deaths figures too in their reporting of the Covid-19 death toll. Its excess deaths
reports became, in BODRU’s words, ‘a particularly popular online resource’.
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However, this did not stop Mkhize from removing Gray and several other members
from the MAC when he rationalized its membership in September 2020. This was said
to be intended to reduce disciplinary duplication among its members and to trim the
number of directly or indirectly state-paid medical appointees serving on it. Yet, as one

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