Mason Institute Webinar: Inoculating Individuals, Exposing Nations: Ebola Vaccine Trials and Global Health Research in West Africa

Location:
Online only
Date/time
Tue 27 February 2024
13:00-14:00
About this event
For several years now, global health research has been plagued by concerns about power and equality. As a partial response to these concerns, there is increasing emphasis on equity and equitable collaborations to redress power imbalances. But exactly how these concepts operate in the context of colonial and post-colonial histories and theories is yet to be defined.
Using Ebola vaccine trials in Sierra Leone and Liberia as case studies, this study draws on decolonial and post-colonial theories and histories to understand their impact on collaborative efforts in global health research. The 2014 Ebola outbreak was the deadliest outbreak in West Africa. A cornerstone of the international response was developing a safe and effective vaccine. Few studies have considered the impact of structural inequalities and colonial legacies on conducting novel and expensive clinical trials in host countries. This is also important because trials were not just about testing a safe vaccine, they were also inaugural for clinical research in both countries.
This is a qualitative sociological study involving 57 face-to-face interviews with researchers and other actors involved in Ebola vaccine trials in Sierra Leone and Liberia between February and June 2022.
The findings reflect an interesting tension between laudable ambitions and practices to promote equity in collaboration, set against structural challenges and colonial legacies that compromise researchers’ ability to enact those ambitions. In both countries, trials are framed as progressively equitable in that they meaningfully included local researchers, developed critical research capacity, and supported healthcare systems, amongst other aspects. Findings reveal that while the meaningful inclusion of local researchers was an important feature of trials, such forms of inclusion at the level of trials obscure large structural dynamics which limit not only inclusion but structural transformation. Related to inclusion and the value of the trials, inequality is seen as underwriting the value of trials rather than an incidental contextual feature. Additionally, while capacity building is also a key feature of trials, for research and its attending benefits to continue, countries are dependent on more trials. Following on from dependency, local researchers want to address urgent health challenges in their countries but are forced to extravert, ensuring that research addresses the interests and standards of international actors. Taken together, this suggests that both countries are effectively locked into particular models of global health research and interventions. This model seems to require dependency and inequality as underlying conditions, which allows for successful research, all the while also incorporating practices of inclusion, which are only meaningful if researchers and research are extraverted. Overall, the thesis concludes that while practices promoting equity in international partnerships are important, they are insufficient and may obscure structural injustices. Critically attending to inter-connected histories and contexts offers an opportunity for global health research to develop different kinds of partnerships to foster systems of repair and care.
About the speaker
Marlyn is a PhD student in the Ethics Lab at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His PhD research investigates how international collaborations in global health continue to deepen historic and new forms of inequalities. To explore this question, he focuses on the Ebola vaccine clinical trials conducted in Sierra Leone and Liberia after the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Taking histories of domination and oppression seriously, the project aims to understand how taken-for-granted practices in global health collaborations, with particular reference to clinical trials, may create further inequities. His previous work has focussed on inequality, stigma, genomics, equity and international collaborations in global health. Marlyn’s research interests are at the intersections of inequality, social theory, global health, bioethics, science and technology.
This event is online only.