I think we need to be more realistic about the news of medical advancements that Nigerian media tend to uncritically present to the public. The media often misrepresent news of medical/pharmaceutical advancements, betraying a poor understanding of how things really work. #Thread
Let’s start with the viral video of Senegal having developed a $1 Covid Test Kit
Number 1, at time of announcement, it was still a prototype. There’s a JOURNEY from prototype to validation + commercial reproducibility
Number 2, when it’s finally ready, it won’t - can’t - be $1.
Number 1, at time of announcement, it was still a prototype. There’s a JOURNEY from prototype to validation + commercial reproducibility
Number 2, when it’s finally ready, it won’t - can’t - be $1.
Here’s the actual story of that Kit. A UK company called Mologic developed the Technology, and selected a WHO Reference Lab in Senegal as one of the sites to test and validate (which takes time!), and also, as one of the manufacturing locations: mologic.co.uk/mologic-and-in…
To assume that announcement of development of a kit automatically means that the Kit is ready for commercial sale & use is to be ignorant of how medical & pharmaceutical development work. We all need the Media to be more nuanced & responsible in how they report these things.
Look at the Madagascar “cure” too. Pure PR. As far as I know, there‘s no (publicly-available) medical evaluation. But the media jumped on it because it was a nice and sellable and click-attracting story. Nigerians too jumped on it to attack Nigeria and Buhari. If only they knew.
Meanwhile, this...
A lot of you trolled and mocked this, at the time. It’s not by hype, or by claims. Due process must be followed for all medical and pharmaceutical innovation.
A lot of you trolled and mocked this, at the time. It’s not by hype, or by claims. Due process must be followed for all medical and pharmaceutical innovation.
Even the recent news that Nigeria has successfully developed an RNA Extraction Kit needs a bit of context. Development of a prototype is not the end of the journey. You then need to get to a level where, when mass-produced, it’s still able to REPRODUCE initial quality of results.
As DG NCDC put it yesterday (paraphrasing him): There’s still some way to go to scale it to a level where it produces consistently replicable results. It’s not enough to produce results on a small scale, the quality of the output must be replicable and verifiable AT SCALE.
