Madagascar’s brew and the pandemic - The Nation Nigeria

By Kayode Robert Idowu

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic across the world, one product that has been projected as its nemesis coming out of Africa is Madagascar’s Covid-Organics. The brew has been vocally canvassed as nature’s fatal blow against the deadly coronavirus – a potent remedy for prevention and cure of the virus from a  remote island, making the brew’s touted effectiveness all the more an ironic ambush.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has not given its nod to Covid-Organics or any other formulation in ongoing global quest for official medication to tackle down the virus, saying it has not been clinically tested. But that has not constrained the visibility of the herbal product or willingness of some African countries to try it out on their Covid-19 patients. In apparent desperation to leash the pandemic, Tanzania, Comoros, Guinea-Bissau and the Republic of Congo have adopted the brew. Nigeria also received a consignment brought in tow recently by Guinea Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embalo during a visit to Abuja. President Muhammadu Buhari did say, however, that the remedy would not be administered on Nigerian Covid-19 patients until it is put through the mill of local verification and validation processes.

Without the leverage of official certification by WHO, Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina has been the chief personal marketer of the therapy developed by Malagasy Institute of Applied Research (IMRA). At its public presentation in Antananarivo, the country’s capital on 20th April, he took a long swig straight out of the bottle in the strongest possible optics of endorsement and validation. When the global community did not come stampeding to place orders after that launch, he calibrated his sales pitch for further effect by saying they dithered on adopting the brew only because it came from Africa.

Now we know the supply of the  herbal product to countries that have shown interest isn’t a function of plain African brotherly benefaction by Madagascar. A source recently told The Nation newspaper that there is a price tag of over 170,000 euros (N78, 200,000) attached to the consignment sent to Nigeria. “We have received the invoice because the African country has made us to realise that the drugs are not being given out free,” the source was quoted saying, adding: “We are being asked to pay for the drugs yet to be validated. Since the AU (African Union) directed the supply of the drugs to African countries, we may have no choice than to pay for it.”

Considering President Rajoelina’s recent tweet that the product “will be distributed free of charge to our most vulnerable compatriots and sold at very low prices to others. All profits will be donated to IMRA to finance scientific research,” it was not immediately clear if the bill handed in for Nigeria’s consignment reflected some subsidy; and if it did, what the actual cost of the product would have been amidst a raging pandemic that hazards the lives of the poor as much as the rich. Besides, Madagascar has implicitly patented the herbal brew in inventor’s exclusivity. Although its chief ingredient is made known as the sweet wormwood artemisia annua, a plant of Asian origin from which antimalarial drug Artemisinin derived, its other components are not disclosed, neither how the compound is put together.

And there is the issue: other than the product having experimental status, since it has not been clinically verified and certified by world health authorities, those other factors fly in the face of the global drive to crack the nut of Covid-19. For instance, the current push by the world leadership elite is to have new vaccines, diagnostics and treatments for the virus delivered at no cost to end-users so to ensure equitable access.

At the launch of the WHO’s Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator late in April, the agency’s Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus stressed that the objective is to make the tools equally available to all. “We will only halt Covid-19 through solidarity,” he said, adding: “Countries, health partners, manufacturers and the private sector must act together and ensure that the fruits of science and research can benefit everybody. Our shared commitment is to ensure all people have access to all the tools to prevent, detect, treat and defeat Covid-19…Past experience has taught us that even when tools are available, they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen.”

That expectation has gotten more categorical. Only two weeks ago, 140 personages including sitting and former presidents / prime ministers of different countries, along with other leaders signed an unprecedented joint letter demanding that all vaccines, treatments and tests for Covid-19 be made patent-free, distributed fairly and made available to all people in all countries free of charge. “Now is not the time to allow the interests of the wealthiest corporations and governments to be placed before the universal need to save lives, or to leave this massive and moral task to market forces. Access to vaccines and treatments as global public goods are in the interests of all humanity. We cannot afford for monopolies, crude competition and near-sighted nationalism to stand in the way,” they wrote in the letter, with one of their demands being an institutional arrangement that “guarantees Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostics, tests and treatments are provided free of charge to everyone, everywhere.”

Signatories to this epic letter include South African President and Chair of the African Union, Cyril Ramaphosa; his Ghana and Senegal counterparts, Nana Akufo-Addo and Macky Sall; Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan; former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Felipe González (Spain), Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia), Festus Mogae (Botswana), Joyce Banda (Malawi); ex-Prime Ministers Gordon Brown (United Kingdom), Esko Aho (Finland), José Manuel Barroso (Portugal) as well as wife of the late legend Nelson Mandela, Graça Machel.

If the bill handed to Nigeria for the supply of Madagascar’s brew reflects that country’s way of making the product available, it falls utterly short of the direction of global exertions to take down the pandemic. Besides that the drug isn’t yet officially certified, its reputation is dented by the country’s disclosure early last week of Covid-19 related death of a 57-year-old medical worker who also suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure. It was the country’s first record in this regard, but it nonetheless showed that its potion’s handle on the epidemic isn’t impregnable.

Rather than Nigeria paying for Madagascar’s therapy, available funds should be channeled to funding local researches and inventions. But there are lessons to be learnt from the tiny island nation in how to make impact. President Rajoelina stomped for his country’s offering with very effective optics, like making a personal presentation of the product and consuming some quantity of it in public. Such optics considerably overawed cynicism and stamped in the product as authentic – so much so that the WHO was almost on the defensive in explaining why the product was not being instantly accredited. The closest thing to this we saw was United States President Donald Trump endorsing the use of chloroquine.

Nigeria’s verification and validation authorities, namely the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD), should get more proactively engaged with processing local claims of therapies – there are many claims, it is likely they aren’t all empty; and when a genuinely effective prospect is identified, leadership at the highest level should pitch in to promote that invention for maximum visibility. That way, we encourage local inventors while also registering this country’s name for reckoning in global dynamics of Covid-19. It’s a win-win.