Secrecy undermines our trust

SOME of South Africa’s most respected and influential scientists have been engaged for weeks in a bitter spat over the government’s vaccine roll-out, or lack thereof.

On the one side are academics from the universities of Witwatersrand, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal. On the other, the head of the vaccine arm of the advisory committees set up supposedly to provide the best possible scientific advice to shape the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Perhaps because the barbed exchanges have been conducted through editorials and correspondence in the normally sedate pages of the august SA Medical Journal (SAMJ), the matter has gone virtually unremarked upon. That’s unfortunate, because the dispute goes to the heart of the government’s inability to heed expert advice, even when it has specifically solicited it.

All around the world, one of the mantras of the past pandemic year has been “to listen to the science”. That’s all good and well, but the science is rarely unambiguous and uncontested.

Scientists are not immune to cherry-picking information that drives them towards conclusions that chime with their personal ambitions and prejudices. In addition, the welding of science to policy is beset with difficulties, not the least of them being that most politicians’ brains are wired to be fact-free vacuums.

In South Africa, despite the initial assurances of President Cyril Ramaphosa and Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize that the process of using science to inform policy would be transparent, it has been anything but. And, as is invariably the case with the ANC government, ideology and ministerial clout were quickly shown to trump rational thinking.

The first scientist to publicly break ranks was the Medical Research Council (MRC) president, Professor Glenda Gray. In a media interview she criticised the government’s lockdown regulations and noted that child malnutrition cases had, during the pandemic, increased.

This prompted a sharp rebuttal from Mkhize and his director-general Dr Anban Pillay calling Gray “a liar” and demanding that the MRC board investigate her conduct. So much for the cut and thrust of scientific debate.

Although Gray won the battle when the MRC backed her up, she lost the war. Within months, the most outspoken medical scientists on the Ministerial Advisory Committee were peremptorily axed in what Mkhize, with Orwellian cynicism, described as a “strengthening” of the committee.

Gray got the chop, as did Professor Shabir Madhi, head of vaccinology at the Wits University and leader of South Africa’s first two Covid-19 vaccine trials, Professor Francois Venter of Wits, head of the Ezintsha international network of public health experts, and Dr Angelique Coetzee, chairp erosn of the SA Medical Association.

It’s not a robust debate that makes us feel insecure and distrustful. It’s “experts” who want to take life or death decisions in secret, free from scrutiny. WSM on Twitter