Page 68 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

If, at least in its early years, the MRC’s involvement with the SAAVI was marked
by optimism and excitement – an upbeat Makgoba described it as being ‘at the cutting
edge of scientific research and discovery’ – its engagement with those punting
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non-biomedical therapy against HIV/AIDS was confrontational from the start. For
instance, when it was asked to pronounce on the claims of the drug Virodene as a
cure for AIDS in 1998, its panel of researchers gave this toxic brew a unanimous
thumbs-down. Virodene was ‘nonsense’ and lacked ‘any scientific integrity’, Makgoba
announced before recommending that it be banned. This left the makers and
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Virodene’s enthusiastic champions in the Cabinet livid. One of these champions was
the Deputy President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki.
A year later, Mbeki, now President, began to air questions about the very existence
of AIDS as a distinct disease, about whether its aetiology might lie in poverty rather
than in a virus, and about the safety of the antiretroviral drug AZT being used by
doctors to prevent mother-to-child transmission. As he read his way into the literature
and websites of AIDS dissidents, so he sought scientific support for these views
from Makgoba, a comrade in the African Renaissance. In fact, Mbeki had written a
foreword to Makgoba’s account of his controversial tenure at the University of the
Witwatersrand and also contributed a prologue to a volume on the African Renaissance
edited by Makgoba.
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It thus must have been with some ambivalence that Makgoba spoke scientific truth
to political power when he rebuffed these ideas as ‘pure rubbish’, ‘pseudoscience’
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and as posing ‘the greatest danger to the African Renaissance’. ‘Lurching from
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one crisis to the next with no coherent short- or long-term strategy to deal with the
explosive HIV/AIDS epidemic, … the government is retreating behind revisionist
theories’, he warned. 44
Nor did the strong-minded Makgoba limit his opposition to the written word.
Citing South Africa’s lopsided mortality statistics which showed an extraordinary
increase in the number of young adults who died in 1999 compared with 1990, he
lectured the Presidential Advisory Council on AIDS that this could be explained only
by AIDS. To counter the website which Mbeki set up for the dissidents on the Advisory
Council to debate their views, he allowed a site hosted by the MRC to be established
for the orthodox AIDS scientists on the Council to do the same, while, just ahead
of the AIDS 2000 conference in Durban, he co-edited the 5,000-signature Durban
Declaration, which stated unequivocally that HIV causes AIDS. ‘I took the stand that
I took for my scientific and academic ethos … and as a matter of protecting the quality
and excellence of science in a developing country’, he explained in retrospect.
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Mbeki and his complaisant minions, including his Minister of Health, Manto

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