On Ebola Flap, Both Sides Are Wrong

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

June 28, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

This knee-jerk tendency of Ghanaian parliamentary leaders to summon citizens they deem to have affronted them before the Privileges Committee of the House is, to say the least, rather presumptuous and nauseating (See "Parliament Summons Alex Dodoo Over 'Ebola Attack'" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/16/15). In one of the most recent instances, Prof. Alexander Dodoo, of the University of Ghana's School of Medicine and Dentistry, was invited to explain himself because the research scientist had dared to impugn the common sense and intellectual integrity of House members.

My rudimentary understanding of the function of the parliamentary privileges committee, is to discipline MPs deemed to have violated or recklessly abused their House membership privileges, or deemed to have brought the name, reputation and dignity of the House into disrepute. If one may humbly ask of our MPs: Exactly what kind of privileges have you, Representatives of our National Assembly, awarded Prof. Dodoo for you to so cavalierly presume to haul the respected scientist before the House's Privileges Committee, to answer for charges pertaining to the reputation and dignity of House members? Or is it for the vacuous privilege of Prof. Dodoo's simply being a bona fide Ghanaian citizen in the evidently warped imagination of House members?

When President John Dramani Mahama, then Chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), consented to Ghana's being designated as the Ebola Headquarters for the West African sub-region, it ought to have sunk underneath the skulls of Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho and Majority Leader Alban Bagbin, and their associates and minions in the House, that Mr. Mahama had literally sold Ghanaians down the creek, as it were. And maybe he really had no choice. But whatever be the case, my problem with the entire decision to test the efficacy of the Ebola Trial Vaccine has fundamentally to do with location and timing. If the Health Ministry authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO) are telling us the truth, then the most conducive testing grounds for the Ebola Trial Vaccine ought to be Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

This, of course, is not to say that Ebola Trial Vaccines could not be effectively and successfully conducted in Ghana. What it means is that quicker and more credible results regarding the effectiveness of the Ebola Vaccine could be best achieved in the aforementioned countries, which were labeled by WHO as the epicenters of the infection and spread of the Ebola Virus. In the case of Ghana, my primary concern is the fact that at the time the decision to conduct clinical trials in Hohoe, the Volta Region, and elsewhere, was taken, there had virtually been no comprehensive public education vis-a-vis the need and intent of the trial in the media by the Ministry of Health and other relevant agencies. In other words, no defintive protocol had been established to ensure that the trials could be undertaken without the predictable negative public reaction.

Then also, it ought to be borne in mind the fact that there is a well-documented history of Africans being recklessly used as dispensable guinea-pigs by practitioners of Western medicine, for anybody's publicly expressed suspicion to be shrugged off as the mere paranoia of an ignoramus, which is what one clearly reads underneath Prof. Dodoo's expression of both conniption and chagrin. And here, to back up the genuine misgivings of the Parliamentary Majority Leader, ought to be recalled the fact that on occasion eminent U.S. medical scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), at Maryland's National Institutes of Health (NIH), have been the first to subject themselves to trial vaccines, thus allaying the fears of potential and prospective candidates for such clinical trials. If memory serves me accurately, President Barack H. Obama even once subjected himself with an Aids trial vaccine. This is what real leadership is about.

In the case of the aborted Hohoe Ebola vaccine trial, no such exemplary leadership was shown on the part of Dr. Dodoo and his associates. And so it comes as rather insulting to the intelligence of Ghanaians for the Legon medical scientist to facilely presume the availability of a ready and eager pool of candidates for such trials (See "Babgin Tells Prof. Dodoo To Test Ebola Vaccine First" Ghanaweb.com 6/17/15). Indeed, when I told my highly gifted 9-year-old son about the subject of this article, his gut reaction was as follows: "What a dumb idea, Daddy! Is not like Ghana is the poorest country in the world. Or is it?"

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