Members of the ministerial advisory committee (MAC) who have been advising the South African Health Department on COVID-19, have questioned the need for a team of World Health Organisation (WHO) experts deployed to assist with the pandemic, reports Business Day.
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 Switzerland.
Business Day writes that Professor 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.
MAC member and head of the Ezintsha health unit at Wits, Dr 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. He said the WHO team’s expertise would be better used in lower-resourced African countries.
Mkhize said the ministry had received questions about the team arriving when it appears the pandemic has plateaued in SA with new infections dropping.
“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.”
Business Day also writes that 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.
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