Meet Glenda Gray, the woman leading the battle to contain Covid-19

Working an 18-hour day, 20 000 e-mails behind and always rushing to the next meeting, Professor Glenda Gray’s past year of the Covid-19 pandemic came with not only career highlights, but shocking deaths of close colleagues and staff.

Gray’s prowess as an HIV vaccine researcher, also studying mother to child transmission interventions, placed her in a position to get involved in the Covid-19 vaccine research.

A year later, she heads the rollout of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine study which aims to jab half a million healthcare workers, a programme she described as the highlight of her career.

“Being able to be part of a programme that rolls out the Sisonke study to half a million healthcare workers has been amazing. “My team and I have worked 24/7 since early in February, making sure that this can work,” she said, while driving to her research unit at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital on Thursday morning.

The president of the South African Medical Research Council said she felt vulnerable, yet determined to find a solution to the then unknown virus when her colleagues succumbed to it at the start of the pandemic.

“One of the first people in the country that died of Covid-19 is one of our researchers, right in the beginning of the pandemic.

“It shocked us to the core that someone who worked close to us died. I lost some staff members too – people who worked with me,” she said.

She became a more familiar name during the initial stages of the lockdown when she butted heads with government on their handling of the pandemic. She was again vocal on procuring the vaccine, calling on government to hasten the process.

Despite her views, she managed to get Johnson & Johnson on board, a move which changed her decades of work in vaccines.

“Professor Shabir Madhi managed to get NovoVax and AstraZeneca to do research and I got to get Johnson & Johnson people interested in working in South Africa. For me it was exciting.

“I worked in HIV vaccines and I failed all the time and never had a vaccine successful all my life. I do a vaccine on Covid-19 and there we go, it works.”

The single mom of three adult children now has an 18-hour day filled with meetings, research and pressures from the media.

“The media attention also creates a lot of pressure. Not just for me but for every scientist in the country that has been a go-to person. Never before in the history of South Africa has the media been so obsessed with scientists.

“It’s wonderful for science but for us who are not used to this, it can be hard having to give advice and insight. It’s a lot of responsibility,” she said.

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