A renowned Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Professor Peter Jazzy-Ezeh, has faulted the method being used to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, stressing the need for inter-disciplinary approach to tackle the dreaded disease.
Ezeh noted that the social and ecological factors associated with the disease had not been fully captured in the global efforts to contain the pandemic.
He made this submission in his speech at an international conference of anthropologists at the University of Namibia (UNAM), Windhoek, Namibia, on Wednesday. The event originally planned as a physical meeting was changed to a virtual format due to the challenges posed by the disease. It was organised in collaboration with five major anthropological groups worldwide: World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA), Pan-African Anthropological Association (PAAA), Anthropology in Southern Africa (ASnA), Ethnological and Anthropological Society of Nigeria (EASON) and the host university, UNAM. Professor Ezeh is the President of EASON.
According to the erudite professor, some official reactions to the new disease were driven by panic and other non-medical factors even when the nature of the virus and how it spread were not yet fully understood.
He said it was against familiar medical logic that the disease was barely understood when the medical authorities rushed in a vaccine.
Replying to a question later, he said that while medical scientists researched on discovering a vaccine in the more familiar ways, efforts at this point should have been concentrated on non-vaccine preventive measures, and treatment of those that had already contracted the disease.
He said that claims of cure and prophylactics from practitioners of ethno-medicine in such countries as Madagascar and Nigeria had not been given adequate attention, and wondered why there seemed to be desperation to promote vaccines by European and American pharmaceutical establishments.
His words: “There are claims that ethnomedicine is effective in fighting the disease. Have such claims been thoroughly investigated, and if indeed they are found to be credible, must the world continue to stick to the Hobson choice of vaccines of the Western-style medical model?”
According to him, there are also reactions to the disease that suggest extra-medical influences that require investigations by specialists in other academic fields. He, therefore, queried the haste with which travel ban was clamped on some African countries when the Omicron variant of the microbe was reported whereas nothing was done to the Chinese when the original form of the virus was found there.
“When the generic microbe was discovered in China, no travel ban was imposed on the Chinese. On the contrary, when a variant of the microbe was found in South Africa, travel ban was imposed on the entire southern African region, and as the days go by, the ban is also being imposed on other countries on the continent,” he said.
“Anthropological interventions can help sort out mere panic from genuine concerns and remove what some commentators see as inter-group bias from the strategies in tackling it (the virus),” he added.
Ekeh observed that the disease spread faster in certain environments than in others, arguing, “it would be helpful if the factors that slow down the spread in those areas can be harnessed to help those in the areas where the spread is rapid.”
“Anthropological knowledge has also the potential to help resolve some aetiological and therapeutic issues that are currently being debated on this disease. For example, with poorer medical facilities, yet many West African countries at present seem to have lower morbidity rates from the disease than developed countries with better orthodox health care. Is the reason for this apparent epidemiological variability to be found in the ecology or environment of these localities, their sociality, or what,” he queried.