The PANAFRICAN Review
pandemic , the variations , and their causes . African leaders also defied these expectations of dereliction and took the pandemic seriously within different political , economic , and social constraints . Similarly , the African Union that has for decades been accused of indifference in the lives of Africans surprisingly developed a sense of urgency . It quickly set up the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention ( Africa CDC ) and recruited a highly regarded epidemiologist , the Cameroonian Dr John Nkengasong , who until his appointment was at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta .
Since its establishment , the Africa CDC has collected and centralised information and shared it to governments to inform measures to contain the spread of the virus , the process of procuring testing supplies at the very early stages of the pandemic , as well as advice on the movement of people inside and outside the continent .
Most significantly , however , the Africa CDC insisted that Africa needed to control its own vaccine resources , which led to the setting up of AVAX . The Centre understood that the arrangement of the international community under COVAX was a return to relying on the benevolence of those who would tell Africans , “ Don ’ t worry , we will get you the vaccines .” In other words , as bad as the problem of vaccine equity has been due to export restrictions on the part of vaccine manufacturers , the situation would have been much worse had it been entirely left to such ‘ benevolence .’ However , Africa CDC is not moving at as fast as it had hoped to due to internal logistical challenges that are affecting rollout capacity in some countries and what he calls ‘ overhyped issues of vaccine hesitancy ’ that are , in his view , excuses for those who are not willing to share vaccines .
Time Magazine has named Dr Nkengasong among The 100 Most Influential People of 2021 for his role in Africa ’ s pandemic response . One can say , therefore , that his work has partly helped to answer the question why Africans are not dying .
In this interview , conducted in August , 2021 , we ask Dr Nkengasong what he has done right , what he has done wrong in hindsight , and what should be expected of Africa CDC as the continent continues to confront the pandemic .
PAR : How prepared was Africa for the pandemic , and how does that reflect in how it is managing it ?
Unfortunately , because of our weak healthcare systems , Africa was not prepared for such a pandemic ; I mean , not at all . Our health systems continue to be challenged by even endemic diseases which we had before Covid-19 ( such as HIV , TB , and Malaria ) and the rising rates of non-communicable diseases like cancer , diabetes , and hypertension . So , with such a fragile system , it is hard to say that Africa was prepared . However , Africa reacted very quickly to the pandemic and actually was privileged because we saw this happening , like a fire that spread from China , beginning from
December 2019 , to Europe , and by the time it arrived in Africa , on the 14th of February 2020 in Egypt , we knew it was coming .
At that time , at the AU ’ s Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention ( Africa CDC ), we had selected experts from nearly all the countries that had direct flights with China and trained them in Senegal on how to do diagnosis for Covid-19 . There were really no countries that had the capacity to test for Covid-19 ; by capacity , I mean the agents to test were not there because , otherwise , there are many labs in Africa .
And luckily , when the first cases reported in Egypt , the experts trained in Senegal with the Africa CDC were on hand to start doing the testing with the test kits that we had shipped to them .
We later had another training for African health professionals in South Africa , and then the whole continent was able to test for Covid-19 . So , the point I ’ m making is that even though the continent was not prepared , we moved into full-scale action because we knew it was going to hit us . There ’ s a paper that I can send to you which I wrote in January and published in Natural Medicine ( at that time , there were about 200 cases in the whole world and only around China , Thailand and Hong Kong ), where I advised that Africa would need to be prepared because this virus would show up on the continent , and it did . This shows how quickly viruses can spread and how a threat anywhere in the world is a threat everywhere in the world .
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