Page 149 - 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

health system under the intense pressure of the Covid-19 crisis, which, they believed,
clearly demonstrated the need for major structural reforms to enable it to meet ‘the
health care needs of the entire population’. At the more personal level, some units
42
sought to probe the extent to which the front-line health-care workforce coped with
these extraordinary demands psychologically and emotionally. Indeed, for more than
a few MRC researchers, their own research in communities during this time, as they
visited households and interviewed people as part of surveillance studies, became their
way of managing the fraught environment around them, for this gave them and their
teams ‘a sense of worth and togetherness at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,
at a time where everything seemed hopeless’, as one admitted candidly with self-
awareness. ‘While conducting community COVID-19 screening and testing, collecting
data on the impact of COVID-19 on individuals, households and communities at large,
we came to the realisation that our work is important and carries us through all life
seasons’, she explained.
43
This sense of doing something positive and meaningful in the face of the rampaging
Covid-19 pandemic was felt by many at the MRC, it seems. Gray reported that the
MRC staff were ‘incredibly proud of what the MRC has done during Covid … and say,
“When I tell people where I work, they know, they’ve heard of the MRC now.” That
for them was a great thing. Suddenly the MRC was a household name.’
44
That Gray’s determination to speak scientific truth to power no matter what and
to put her all into securing an anti-Covid-19 vaccine for South Africa was, of course,
a major reason for this, but it was not something which she mentioned. Yet, the
testimony of some MRC staff confirms this to be the case. One unit director admitted
that she was ‘really proud of being able to say that I work with Glenda. During Covid,
the leadership she displayed was really great’, while another believed that she had
45
more than earned the credibility she now enjoyed by virtue of what she did ‘in the
pandemic space’. Indeed, for some with long memories, her challenges to official
46
stances and policies were akin to Malegapuru Makgoba’s brave, unyielding line against
AIDS denialists twenty years earlier.
Gray herself believed that ‘everybody [at the MRC] rose to the occasion and was
committed to doing this thing and we were all aligned on the strategy … Where there’s
a will, there’s a way, and where there’s commitment, it can be done … I don’t think
anyone loves the MRC as much as I love the MRC’, to which her interviewer replied,
‘And it should love you in return.’ 47
Led by Gray and distinguished by imaginative, wide-ranging and vigorously
mobilized collaborative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, the MRC passed this
dire stress test with flying colours, being found neither lacking in initiative nor wanting

142