A senior official has rejected claims by activists that the health department has deviated from scientific input and withheld information on how it has managed the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the department’s deputy director-general for National Health Insurance, Nicholas Crisp, all the advisories it received from scientists have been publicly released.
The Health Justice Initiative launched legal action last week in a bid to compel the government to disclose details of all the advisers it has consulted, the counsel received and how this input has been used to determine the decisions it has taken in response to Covid-19.
It has taken aim at the ministers of health, co-operative governance & traditional affairs, and sport, arts & culture.
The Health Justice Initiative hoped to determine the extent to which the government has deviated from scientific input and the reasons why it has done so at various points during the pandemic.
The recommendations from experts appointed to health minister Joe Phaahla’s advisory committee on Covid-19 have often been published weeks or months after submission to him, and only then has it become clear that the cabinet has at times deviated sharply from their counsel, without explanation.
There has been no public disclosure to date of the extent to which Phaahla’s recommendations to the National Coronavirus Command Council departed from the counsel he received, or how the council’s input to the cabinet varied from the final decisions taken.
Crisp defended the department’s approach, saying all the advisories provided by the ministerial advisory committee on Covid-19 and its working groups had been published on the government’s coronavirus website as soon as the health department had determined how to respond to them.
“I am personally responsible for ensuring that the advisories are posted once the minister has seen them, we have discussed them and worked out how to implement them,” said Crisp.
Ministerial advisory committee advisories had at times required discussion with other government departments, port health and health MECs. There were also practical considerations ranging from cost implications to administrative changes, he said.
Phaala consulted widely and received input from multiple sources such as Medical Research Council president Glenda Gray, University of KwaZulu-Natal epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim, and the World Health Organization. “Everyone has the ear of decision-makers. That is part of our challenge,” he said.
The Health Justice Initiative said last week that one of the reasons it was taking legal action was because its request for records from the health department, made in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act, had been ignored.
Crisp said the department had not responded to the request because it had been too broad. “(It) would have taken a year to collect all the information they wanted. They wanted not only every document, they wanted minutes of every meeting, discussion documents, emails, letters ... in other words they wanted my entire computer, the minister’s and the director-general’s,” he said.
“To ask for a ‘WikiLeaks’ on everything in the entire government, and to use our own laws to do it, is just irritating.”
The Health Justice Intitiative has also launched a court bid to compel the health department to disclose details of the supply contracts it signed with coronavirus vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. The department is opposing the matter.
The government was contractually bound to keep details of the contracts confidential and risked being sued for breach of contract by the vaccine manufacturers if it published them, Crisp said.
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