How science helps government’s Covid-19 decisions

Despite strong pockets of science excellence, South Africa lacked a coordinated approach to effectively deal with challenges the magnitude of the Covid-19 global pandemic, department of science and innovation (DSI) director-general Dr Phil Mjwara said yesterday.

Addressing a webinar on scientific research to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic, Mjwara said the DSI has come up with the national policy data observatory (NPDO) – a national multidisciplinary science-based approach – designed to facilitate coordination on health, economic and social development policies.

The NPDO, said Mjwara, was intended “to provide opportunities for government departments, academia, labour, industry and civil organisations to better coordinate and communicate complex data sets and analytics in a multidimensional perspective”.

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Asked whether South Africa followed science in responding to the Covid-19 outbreak and whether science worked, Mjwara said the DSI provided scientific data on the pandemic to government through the ministerial advisory council (MAC), which advised Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize, but was not represented on the structure.

“All that the DSI did – using science abilities, which we have developed over a period – was use data and data analytics to support an understanding of what was happening.

“There is a structure in the department of health, supporting the minister,” said Mjwara.

“Our job as the scientific community in this department is to offer the platform and the data, which then gets used in decision-making. On how the data is used, is not something I can answer because we don’t serve on the MAC. I would not know whether the scientific capability – the only decision-making variable – is being used.

“You get a scientific data, but when you make policy decisions, it may not be based only on scientific data.”

Mjwara said the DSI worked on genomics surveillance, data analytics – part of therapeutics – during the early days of the pandemic outbreak.

Of the SA science community, he said: “We do have pockets of science excellence, but I think we just have not applied our minds on putting the various groups together in a coordinated fashion, to pull together the different competences.

“There are still gaps that we have identified in the work we are doing.

“We are now looking at how best we can fill the gaps – either in technology or research – in order to make sure that we are ready for the next pandemic.”

On government’s vaccine roll-out plan, Dr Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela, chief executive of the South African Health Products Authority, said: “We have the J&J vaccine that has conditional market authorisation.

“We are currently in the review process for the [Russian] Sputnik vaccine as well as the [Chinese] Sinovac vaccine.

“We have met with many other vaccine manufacturers and provided guidance on what is required.

“It is very critical that vaccines should show efficacy against the new variant.

“The speed with which the variant was identified in the country, speaks to the strength of the scientific structure that we have in the country.

“Early in the outbreak we saw an emergence of entities that were developing diagnostic tests.

“We worked closely with the national reference lab, the [National Health Laboratory Service] to validate tests.

“We were one of the very few countries who were very stringent on the types of tests that we authorised.

“Today, we have not recalled any of these tests, whereas in other countries they had to recall them. “As a regulator, we continue to ensure that the decisions we make are science-based,” Semete-Makokotlela said.

Brian Sokutu