Kalenga resigns over Ebola response in DR Congo

Oly Ilunga Kalenga visiting an Ebola clinic in Butembo, DR Congo, in March.

 

JOHN WESSELS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Oly Ilunga Kalenga, erstwhile minister of health of DR Congo  resigned Monday in  protest of takeover of the country’s Ebola response by President Félix Tshisekedi. In a letter, Kalenga, 59, alleged there were hidden plans to deploy an experimental Ebola vaccine  to battle the year-long EBV outbreak.

Since August 2018, the DRC has recorded more than 2500 cases of Ebola and, among them, more than 1700 deaths.

He had been Minister since January 2017. He wrote that Tshisekedi’s decision to remove him from heading the country’s Ebola response was made without his knowledge while he was supervising the response in the city of Goma, DRC, where a first Ebola case was diagnosed 14 July.

“As a result of your decision to oversee the response to the Ebola epidemic, and because I anticipate that this decision will inevitably lead to a predictable outcry, I submit to you my resignation as Health Minister,” Kalenga stated in the letter.

He said his ministry had communicated daily on the situation in the ongoing outbreak “to reassure and show the world that the country is managing this epidemic, thus preserving its reputation and preventing negative socioeconomic effects on the impacted regions.”

In his letter, Kalenga attacked efforts to launch trials of an experimental vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson in the country. A Merck & Co. vaccine is already in use in DRC.

 Tshisekedi’s administration had announced that direct supervision of the Ebola response was being placed with a team of experts under the direction of Jean Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, Director-General of the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research (NIBR) and a microbiologist at the University of Kinshasa’s medical school. Tamfum has studied Ebola and responded to outbreaks for more than 40 years.

The change in leadership came days after the World Health Organization declared the DRC outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, welcomed the move as a bold decision to change strategy and bring the Ebola response under direct supervision.

. “The [Merck] vaccine currently used in the context of this epidemic is the only one that has shown efficacy,” Kalenga wrote, and it does so within 10 days. “It is fantastical to think that the new vaccine being recommended (with two doses administered 56 days apart) … could have a determinative effect on the epidemic that’s now underway,” Kalenga wrote. He charged that those proposing the use of the J&J vaccine “have shown a clear lack of ethics by intentionally hiding important information from the health authorities.”