Despite the long history of medical racism, any potential Covid-19 vaccines must be tested in Africa — but not only on the continent.
The year I turned 11, my uncle, Josiah Ssesanga, was admitted to Mulago hospital, Uganda’s biggest, with meningitis. HIV-positive, in 1994. Between him and certain death, stood Uganda’s tattered postwar health system. Nobody was naive about his prognosis. The end of his life was months away at best. existed in other parts of the world, but were very limited in Uganda — mostly for patients who qualified for and agreed to clinical trials.
Then, the day after his admission, “people from some American project” as my aunt, his sister, recalls it, came to them with a mountain of paperwork. The “project” was a clinical trial seeking to test a more effective combination therapy. “There were about three pages on possible side effects of the drug. We were also warned that he would need to keep taking the drugs even if the project ended,” she recalls. “But for most of us, in that hour, our answer was, ‘Yes’. We were desperate.
On the trial, he received a combination of two drugs and they gave him the so-called Lazarus effect In less than two weeks, he was discharged from in-patient care. In the subsequent months, he completed his degree at university and went on to become an inspector of schools, checking in regularly as an out-patient with the researchers. These visits often entailed painful diagnostic lumbar punctures to track his recovery.
However, the clinical trial provided only a few months of maintenance therapy beyond the initial period of their investigation. After that, he was told to begin paying for the treatment. A week’s worth of pills would have cost more than he made in a month! He quietly went off treatment and stopped visiting the hospital. About a year later, a researcher came looking for him, among his relatives. She implored them to get him back on treatment, at his family’s cost.
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