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A don has attacked the current method in the fight against COVID-19, suggesting that there is the need for inter-disciplinary research collaboration in order to fully understand the new disease.
Professor Peter Jazzy-Ezeh, an anthropologist at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) said the social and ecological factors associated with the disease have not been fully captured in the global efforts to contain the medical problem.
Ezeh, former Head of UNN Department of Department of Sociology and Anthropology, spoke at an international conference of anthropologists at the University of Namibia (UNAM), Windhoek, Namibia, yesterday.
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 of 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.
The Nigerian scholar said 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 concentrated on non-vaccine preventive measures, and treatment of those that had already contracted the disease.
He also said that claims of cure and prophylactics from practitioners of ethnomedicine 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.
Ezeh said, “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 the don, there are also reactions to the disease that suggest extra-medical influences that require investigations by specialists in other academic fileds.
