All major Nigerian news dailies were recently awash with front page headlines about the Presidential directive to the COVID-19 Taskforce to obtain the Madagascar cure for Coronavirus called COVID-Organics. This comes weeks after the announcement of the drug’s triumph in treating patients in the East African island of a pandemic which has claimed more than 286,000 lives globally with 2,400 African lives.
Madagascar on the other hand, with 186 cases as at May 12, has zero fatalities.
COVID-Organics is a herbal remedy developed from the plant Artemsia annua by a Congolese doctor working in Madagascar, Dr. Jerome Munyangi. Available in a bottled drink form, Madagascar’s President Andriy Rajoelina has enthusiastically marketed it as a traditional remedy to the raging pandemic.
So far, several African countries like Gambia. Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger and Tanzania have taken delivery of consignments of the tonic.
However, even as the herbal mix is catching on in the African continent as a remedy for the deadly pandemic, the body language of the World Health Organization and some Western nations clearly suggest they prefer to develop their own vaccines. The prospects of COVID-Organics being a workable preventive tonic certainly does not feature in the plans of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) which is working on raising $2bn to fund ongoing research for a vaccine. Neither is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offering any funding. Couching their incredulity in admittedly valid scientific doubts over the safety of the herbal mix, global bodies don’t seem very interested in even pursuing the possibility of COVID-Organics being the silver bullet for the raging pandemic.
Perhaps, the controversy following Dr. Munyangi’s work on using the Artemisia plant in treatment for another deadly disease, malaria, may shed more light on the reluctance of the West to give COVID-Organics a critical look-in as a possible solution to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Dr. Jerome Munyangi who obtained his medical degree from the University of Kinshasa and has two Masters degrees from the Paris Diderot University and the University of Otawa, has been at the forefront of research into the use of the artemisia plant as tea infusion for malaria treatment rather than in the form of the Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACT), the combination therapy administered in popular anti-malarials like Coartem. The artemisinin used in these ACT drugs are synthetically produced by big pharmaceutical companies for a huge market.
Some reports suggest the powerful pharmaceutical industry may have taken a disagreeable view to Dr. Munyangi’s work in this field which report he published in 2019. His clinical trials in the Congo Democratic Republic proved the two varieties of Artemisia annua and Artemisia afra plant infusions worked just as well as the ACT therapies approved by WHO and produced and marketed by big pharma. The success of the trials suggested tea infusions as an established alternative therapy for malaria treatment but the funds needed for further research were simply not available. A similar research by Frank van der Kooy at Leiden University also petered out for lack of funds.
Perhaps, very revealing is a documentary aired by France 24 in January 2019 where it strongly suggested that the use of artemisia tea threatens the business of the big pharmaceutical companies who produce these ACT drugs. It is estimated that the ACT anti-malaria market alone will be worth almost $700m by 2025.
Could this then be the basis for the scientific disdain which COVID-Organics has received outside Africa? Global multi-sector leadership initiatives have raised a potential $6.5bn to fund urgent research into a vaccine against the Coronavirus. This raises the question about how much attention COVID-Organics is (not) receiving save the product requests from African countries.
It cannot be overstated that at moments where the world is at a crossroads, Africa must seek African solutions. The power and influence of the huge pharmaceutical companies are well acknowledged but this pandemic offers a very important and perhaps once-a-lifetime opportunity for the continent to adopt and standardize homegrown cures for its illnesses. Without a doubt, funding deeper and broader research into products like COVID-Organics is absolutely imperative. The challenge lies with Africa.
The entire pandemic offers the continent unique opportunities to come into her own especially in the field of health. With the developed world reeling from the Coronavirus, Africa, in spite of her shaky health system, seems to be getting off lightly by comparison. The specific factors which created this relative immunity are begging to be identified and engineered to future benefit.
A more prescient AU will begin to work out institutional ways of supporting local research into local remedies for diseases native to the continent while at the same time maintaining high public safety standards. This may be at the sub regional or country level. Entire new protocols, futuristic and unique, must be developed to harness the rich floral offerings on the continent. Mainstreaming pharmacognosy into the continents’s healthcare system has become exigent.
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