Health minister Zweli Mkhize has welcomed the team of 43 World Health Organisation (WHO) experts coming to help SA respond to the coronavirus pandemic amid questions why they are needed as infections have dropped.
On Friday, Mkhize said the significance of SA’s bond “with the World Health Organisation has never been more highlighted than during this cataclysmic period”.
The surge team will be jointly led by SA-born Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, who will work remotely from the Republic of the Congo, and Dr Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, who will work from Geneva, Switzerland.
Mkhize said the ministry had received questions about the team arriving when it appears the pandemic has plateaued in SA with new infections dropping.
“We have received queries why there would be a need for the surge team if we are past the surge. I would like to emphasise for our people that we are not past anything: we are still the country with the fifth-highest positive cases in the world.”
He said the team of 43 experts, 16 of whom have already arrived, “will be looking at our situation with fresh eyes and may be able to identify blind spots or offer a perspective we might not have considered”.
However, a ministerial advisory committee (MAC) of 45 world-class local scientists has been giving advice to the government on the coronavirus pandemic, though this is not always taken.
Alex van den Heever, who holds the chair of Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies at Wits University, asked what expertise the WHO team had that the local scientists and epidemiologists in the MAC didn’t have.
“Why have we brought a team in that has the equivalent expertise to our ministerial advisory committee?” he asked.
“It is not entirely clear what they are able to do that our top experts aren’t able to do.”
Van den Heever also said the “WHO team was arriving as the country’s infections were declining. We are on a declining trajectory in Gauteng and Western Cape has been on a firm downward trend.”
The MAC team, some of whom have publicly criticised the government’s decision to allow taxis to run at full capacity and close schools, was not told in advance about the WHO team’s arrival.
MAC member and head of the Ezintsha health unit at Wits Francois Venter said the local committee has “huge expertise, and we have never even met these 43 experts, nor were we told they were coming”.
Wits professor of vaccinology Shabir Madhi raised questions about the WHO team’s lack of local understanding, and “the contribution they will be able to make in SA, not knowing the intricacies of the local context”.
Madhi was not sure why WHO experts have arrived when cases were dropping. “It is clearly not to assist with managing the surge which is subsiding, at least for this wave.”
Madhi added that he thinks the WHO team’s expertise would be better used in lower-resourced African countries, where there are lower rates of reported infections “but this is likely due to inherent deficiencies in surveillance capacity” and testing.
While some in the MAC team have criticised the government’s handling of the epidemic as not always being based in science, the WHO last week praised the government. Moeti said last week the government “did all the right things”.
“The country responded quickly with the types of interventions that we have seen in other countries and that the WHO has recommended.”
There is growing pressure for the release of the more than 70 MAC advisories on a wide range of issues from taxis to antibody testing and lockdown restrictions.
Mkhize previously said the local scientists’ advice won’t be released as it was not always followed exactly. “[Just] because we have said there is a MAC advising on Covid-19, it doesn’t mean that it is the only body that is giving information that will be taken into account. There are various other players who make contributions that ultimately formulate the policy position that we take,” he said.
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