With the COVID-19 pandemic already impacting more than 40 African countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania, collaboration – within and across sectors – remains one of the effective strategies that will flatten the curve of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
The spread of the epidemic is a major public health threat for all affected countries and as an organisation, we share the WHO’s concern for those countries with weaker health systems who could be disproportionately impacted. Speed is of the essence with these kinds of pandemics and this will require teamwork as well as robust, resilient healthcare systems.
This is the message of Dr Priya Agrawal, MD for South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa of global pharmaceuticals company MSD.
The innovative pharmaceutical industry is facilitative of efforts that will ensure that the scientific community can respond quickly to the challenges this pandemic brings. As a science-driven industry that aims to address some of the world’s biggest health care challenges, the research-based pharmaceutical industry clearly has a role to play in developing new and improved medicines and vaccines to help respond to this pandemic.
“MSD has partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a consortium of life-sciences companies to accelerate the development, manufacture and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics and treatments for COVID-19,” said Agrawal. “The truth is, no single organisation can meet the challenge of a pandemic of this scale and severity.”
We continue to support government efforts through our work with various partners and industry peers to harness country responses and to optimise the use of available resources on the continent.
Globally, the Maternity Foundation – an MSD supported partner – has just launched a COVID-19 module in their Safe Delivery App which reaches over 130,000 frontline healthcare workers in over 10 countries in Africa. MSD for Mothers’ partner – LifeBank – is supporting a mobile testing unit in Lagos with the potential of replicating these in other parts of the country. Lifebank is also developing a digital registry of ventilators in private and public hospitals and matching engineering talent to try and fix those ventilators that are not working. In South Africa, innovative pharma is collaborating with government to ensure that potential supply shortages for medicines are averted and that protective equipment is made available to healthcare workers.
MSD’s long-standing partner PharmAccess Foundation – will start testing for COVID-19 in a select number of facilities in Kenya, while coaching its network of over 2000 SafeCare facilities across Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, on implementing infection control measures and identifying potential COVID-19 infections. Through MSD for Mothers’ partnership withNivi , which has over 350 000 users in Kenya, the digital conversational platform is providing accurate information around COVID-19 while helping to dampen the spread of misinformation around the virus – particularly targeted among young adult population.
MSD also continues to share our experiences and lessons learnt in responding to prior outbreaks, such as Ebola. MSD has experience in successfully partnering with stakeholders across the health sector in the fight against Ebola in countries such as Guinea and the DRC.MSD’s experience in providing vaccines and support for the Ebola epidemic in parts of Africa had shown that partnerships with other health organizations were essential, and that these had to be supported by government, NGOs and the private sector. “We have seen that resilient health systems are critical during anyoutbreak, so MSD remains committed to its efforts to enhance andstrengthen the preparedness of health systemsin various African countries,” said Dr Agrawal.
“All of these programmes are a reflection of what partnerships can achieve,” said Agrawal. “It will really boil down to collaboration between companies and countries if Africa is to hold back the tide and flatten the curve on Covid-19 and any other potential outbreaks.”
