The troublemaker plotting the downfall of Covid-19
Glenda Gray: eighteen-hour days and panic attacks at night. By
P rofessor Glenda E Gray’s CV is a thing to marvel at. One insight gleaned from skimming the 66-page document is not the detail and variety of her illustrious career so much as that some people seem to live more, do more, think more, read more and write more in the same life span — more or less — the rest of us are given.
Gray also loves to run, mostly in nature, though the Covid-19 lockdown meant using a treadmill with Bob Dylan on the headphones.
There is no one word to describe Glenda Gray. “Activist” gets the spotlight for the purposes of this interview, but it’s only one among many labels.
She might have qualified as a doctor in the mid-1980s but that degree appears to have been simply an oiling and conditioning of the engine she was assembling to navigate the rough-terrain adventure of a life in the health sciences in South Africa.
She currently holds the position of CEO and president of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). More germane to the current state of the world is that she chairs the research sub-committee on Health Minister Zweli Mkhize’s team of 50 expert Covid-19 pandemic advisers.
In a career that spans three decades, she has been — and still is — a paediatrician, a researcher, a vaccine developer, a teacher, a mentor, a supervisor, a team leader, a manager, a collector and allocator of grants and funding for research and, throughout, an activist.
It’s noon on another beautiful day in Cape Town and, for someone who is working 12to 18-hour days, seven days a week, she looks fresh and unfrazzled — much more like a social media influencer than a sleep-deprived scientist on the country’s Covid-19 crisis crack team.
She admits she’s had to ease back on the coffee, that the craziness of being on 24/7 duty and the pressure of having to make high-stakes decisions on the hoof while operating under a National State of Disaster was starting to take its toll.
Gray is used to high pressure. She witnessed the ravaging genesis of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, when mothers and babies were deathly ill and dying at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto in the early 1990s. Covid-19 is the same, but different.
“It’s the same panic and sense of crisis but concertinaed into days and weeks. With HIV, the crisis unfolded over months and years. This epidemic is unfolding in hours and days.”
Since March, Gray and her colleagues have been working long hours. Calls go on late into Friday nights and only stop on Sundays at around 10 o’clock at night.
Gray’s career as an activist — and a dissident — started when she was a medical student at Wits University.
Is she still an activist?
“If ‘activist’ equals ‘troublemaker’, then yes, I still think of myself as an activist,” she says, laughing.
As one gets older, it becomes increasingly important to continue acting as an activist because “if we have influence and we keep quiet then that is bad”.
From being a medical student involved in research and lobbying for the rights of all healthworkers, from doctors to hospital cleaners, and in active resistance against the apartheid government at sit-ins and marches, to president of a government-funded organisation, Gray has become, as she says, “part of the status quo”.
She was the fifth of six children. Her mother was a bookkeeper and her father a mine engineer who lived an itinerant life in towns such as Hotazel, Kuruman, Stilfontein and Koffiebus.
The family spoke openly about apartheid issues because her father was progressive and raised his children to be. The family
had settled somewhat by the time she came along and she grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Boksburg – the northern side where the mining activity and housing was.
She has been a teacher and a supervisor. She has won so many awards and honours — including the Nelson Mandela Health and Human Rights Award and inclusion in Time
magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world and Africa’s Top 50 most influential women in Africa — that they take up two pages of her CV.
Gray’s other important role has been “parent” and she’s been lucky, she says, to have spent lockdown with her three children.
Epidemics devastate communities, economies and health systems. For decades. Which possibly makes her less immune to fears about our current crisis than the average lay person.
“I do have panic attacks at night about this epidemic,” she admits. “I wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing. I worry about our country. I’m worried about our healthcare workers and our hospitals and our readiness. Our system was fragile before we started, and this is going to tip us over the edge. I’m also worried that we’ve stopped diagnosing TB.
“While our eyes are on this side, a whole lot of shit is happening on the other side.”
Is there anything that comforts her, rather than terrifies her? “We are going to find a vaccine for Covid-19,” she says emphatically, “and one nice thing about this epidemic is that I have never seen so many doctors, scientists and advocates all working this hard together.” Since she has so many titles and has done so many things, has she ever thought about what she’d like to be remembered for?
A long “um” makes it clear she hasn’t thought about this before, but suddenly she knows the answer: “For finding an HIV vaccine. If I could achieve anything, it would be to be known among the many scientists who failed and failed and failed and eventually succeeded in finding a vaccine for HIV.
“But I’d also settle for being known for helping find a vaccine for Covid-19.” DM168