Page 148 - 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–

Nor was it just the lay public who needed information. For example, medical
practitioners and scientists navigating their way through this novel disease terrain
found the Cochrane Centre Research Unit’s rapid review summaries essential reading
to keep up with the constantly developing knowledge about it, while the Health
Systems Research Unit’s outlines of the latest thinking in managing Covid-19 patients
were eagerly snapped up by health service managers desperate for such guidance.
In these ways the MRC clearly fulfilled the task of translating and communicating
the most up-to-date scientific information about the pandemic to the wider public,
as spelt out as a primary responsibility for such organizations by the WHO in its
Outbreak Communication Guidelines, viz. to convey accurate and comprehensible
scientific information extensively and promptly, as this ‘has become as essential to
outbreak control as epidemiology training and laboratory analysis’. 40
For those research units not primarily using laboratory analysis or epidemiology as
tools of research, the Covid-19 pandemic provided opportunities to track, as a telling
case study, the disease’s impact on their particular research fields, to assess its effects,
and to amend the focus or trajectory of their research investigations in the light of
this where necessary. For example, the Maternal and Infant Healthcare Strategies
Research Unit closely monitored all pregnancies in public hospitals in Gauteng to
try to establish the impact of Covid-19 on pregnancy, while the Gender and Health
Research Unit sought to determine whether successive lockdowns aggravated South
Africa’s dismal record of gender-based violence, femicide and child homicide and, if so,
what the contribution of alcohol was to this. In this regard the four spells when liquor
sales were banned offered rare control periods to test such a presumed relationship.
Recognizing too the unusually stressful psychological, emotional and social
conditions created by the pandemic in locked-down families, especially between
parents and children, the Risk and Resilience in Mental Disorders Research Unit
examined how they dealt with this situation. Frankly, it explained, Covid-19 provided
‘a window on the relevant underlying [coping] mechanisms’ in a bid to understand the
wider question of risk and resilience in mental disorders.
41
Several other research units inquired into how different communities made sense of
the pandemic and the extent to which this affected their responses to it, a dimension of
particular importance in understanding the degree of adherence to the Government’s
Covid-19 regulations and to vaccine hesitancy or refusal when vaccines first became
available in 2021. In this regard, an analysis of exchanges about Covid-19 on Twitter
by the Cochrane SA Research Unit proved especially illuminating.
Yet other research units focused on evaluating the performance of the country’s

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