Page 147 - 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

Mounting these dashboards was just one of the ways in which the MRC and its
units sought to make readily accessible whatever reliable, up-to-date information and
data they could to inform official policy-making, popular behaviour, understanding
and responses. Amidst pandemic panic, countering misbeliefs, myths and misleading
messages with hard science was critical to the making and acceptance of decisions
by the authorities. To this the MRC’s input was crucial as a key member of what
communications specialists call ‘the trust triangle’, and this it and its staff provided
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in abundance in print, via online and social media, and through policy briefs, webinars,
video documentaries, lectures, interviews and articles in the press, and its popularizing
Advancing Life magazine. Exemplifying this commitment was the head of its Vaccine
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and Infectious Diseases Analytics Extramural Research Unit at Witwatersrand
University, Professor Shabir Madhi, who gave 1,682 media interviews about Covid-19
between March 2020 and February 2022. His unit had an obligation to ‘demystify
COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines’, he explained. 39

Circumventing Covid: two scientists from the MRC’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs
Research Unit, Dr Tara Carney (last column, 3 from top) and the deputy-director, Dr
Bronwyn Myers (not shown), attended one of the earliest virtual academic conferences held
during the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020. This international conference was organized
by the InWomen’s Children’s Health and Gender Group whose logo is visible behind several
of the delegates.

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