Well, from time to time, as you know, we's like to speak to someone about their career, what they've done, how they've made their money, but really their career in this time slot on a Monday. And it's my great honor to tell you tonight that we're speaking to Professor Glenda Gray. You'll know, someone who spent a lot of
her life working against HIV. She is also, of course, you will remember, played a very prominent role during the time we were developing vaccines and vaccinations against COVID nineteen and someone who's really spent a life trying to help people. Glenda. Good evening, and thanks so much for taking the time to speak to us tonight.
Good evening. I hope you can hear me, and to your listeners.
No, thank you, we can. You grew up in Boksburg, if Wikipedia is correct. Wikipedia usually is, but not always, And I understand you were one of six children. What kind of community were you growing up in Bocksburg that time? I presume mining was a big factor.
Yes, so my father worked on the mines at RPM. I grew up when I was born in Buxburg, and I grew up first of all in Boxsburg and then we moved to pacetcolld Mapleton and then we just outside Nigel and then we moved to a pace called Scarffin's
Wrist which is just between Springs and Blackpan. And I used to catch a train from Scarffin's Rass station to Boxburg East to go to my primary school, Martin School, in the morning, so my parents would we would Catsuplaine at top A six in the morning and get to Boxburg East at seven and then walk to school so we could save our money for ice cream.
Sure, okay, from what I've read, you were pretty keen to be a doctor pretty early. Now, there were not a lot of female doctors around at the time. What was it about being a doctor that was so important to you? It clearly mattered, I mean it clearly matters to you still. But what was happening around you at the time that made you think it was such a strong belief as a young person that you wanted to be a doctor.
I just it's hard to really understand that as young as form my parents told me that I told them that I wanted to be a doctor. I think it happened around the time at that stage when we were living on a small holding In Mapleton, a car was giving birth and there was a breech delivery and they had to use a rope to pull the calf out. And the vet looked at me and said, oh, I wonder you're going to be a vet. I said, no, I'm going to be a doctor and look after and
look look after human beings. So I guess that was the Tima articulators. And it was around this breech delivery of the of the of this calf.
Was there something about the power of helping an animal then, but helping a human being that the really I mean a breach delivery can be very, very dangerous. And yet you know, the animals would both have walked away, I mean the car for the first time, we walked away healthy. I mean, there's a real power in watching something like that take place.
Maybe it is a huge power, and I think that, you know, just being permitted to you know, I loved animals growing up and as I went to school. You know, I did one at school and in those days in Boxburg, if you did one at school and you were a girl, you had become a teacher because you could get adversary and know and you didn't have to worry about paying for your education. I mean, I told my school Box
to High that I wanted to be a doctor. That kind of smiled endearingly at me, and I guess, you know, I was determined, and I applied to It's university, And at that stage this was doing an experiment. They had decided to diversify who they brought into universe into medical school, so there were a lot more women. In my ear, they're much more racially diverse, and a lot more people that came from in the middle class and working class backgrounds,
not from private school. So when I went to Box, when I got into medical school, you know, it's part of a very diverse group. But I also struggled because I didn't have a good education. In my later years at school, we were short of maths and physics teachers, and I struggled. So, like a lot of people coming into university from education that is not as good as
private schools, it takes a while to catch up. So for the first year or two at medical school, I really felt stupid, and then suddenly in my clinical years, I caught up to my peers and was able to compete and do as well as people who'd come from better schools in Johannesburg.
It's so interesting that, I mean so often it's really about getting through the first year or two of university and then you start to see people really grasping whatever it is and off they go, and that that that clearly happened to you. I do want to skip forward a little bit because I do want to get to some of the other things that you've been involved in. But at one point you clearly realized that HIV was
going to be very, very important in South Africa. And when HIV first came on the scene, you know, sort of mid nineteen eighties, I don't think many people realized how important it was going to be. Did you. Was there a moment when you realized what the aides pandemic and how many South Africa was going to take, how vulnerable we were going to be, how big this thing is.
I think there were three things that pointed me to wanting to do something in HIV. So the first thing was I was a student activist during a part eight and the organization I worked for, which was Health Workers Association, used to organize communities around half issues, and with HIV emerging, I worked in that sector, trying to mobilize communities around
HIV and you know, and work with them. And then I went and worked at Paraguay Hospital and working the main ICU and the part of thoracic surgeon who was in charge of ICU was this brilliant surgeon and I could never understand why he wasn't working in the theaters.
And he was one of the first people in South Africa who got HIV and he died in nineteen eighty eight, and he was a very bright man and very talented, and so his death affected me, and knowing and working with him and him dying a year later was terrible. And then the third thing was as I was working in Barible Hospital in the worlds, we saw HIV change from an exotic disease in childhood. One in three children in our wards having HIV and we were seeing young
babies dying of HIV. So my decision to do HIV research was based on a desire to stop this transmission that was happening mother to child, and so I resigned as a young pediatrician a study to try and prevent RESTMOK transmission. And then I saw the power of data and the power of science and how data can drive decisions.
Particularly around that time we were starting to do work which was inteetrovile therapy and at that stage the government didn't want to provide the European or as teacher and woman to stop HIV stop transmission and we were able to show data which won the court case. And then I eventually and then I realized how powerful clinical data
is and how can how can drive policy. So if you find something works a TV vaccine or a drug, and that can change people's lives because you can prove it, I can get the drug and get registered, it can get into the clinical care and people's lives can be saved. And so doing clinical research is a very powerful way of change the world in terms of improving people's lives.
It was a little bit of a mad time in that the people who are making some of these decisions, and you talk about the court case that was in direct response to the policies of the Embakee government and some of the people around them. And I was starting to report just towards the end of Montchable Alums amongst time as Health minister. But before that there was some crosses on at Lamini Zuma. I don't know if this is true, Lender, but there is a story about you
and her in an argument in a bathroom somewhere. Is that true?
That's true? So I think it was nineteen ninety nine, and it was at the time when the President was presenting the Natural Aids plan, and I got up in the audience and said, you know, where is the AZITCH for pregnant women? And there was a comment that we can't afford az T it's not cost effective. And then when now we were during a break, we were in the toilet, and I said, it's saving, it's cost savings.
It's you know, it's cheaper to use a SAT than to tweet HIV and and you know this is not too talking perhaps that this is too expensive for for our countries.
I've never really understood what was read I mean, and Becky still believes it, by the way, he hasn't changed his view. Have you ever sort of come up with an explanation of why so many people at the time believed what they believed. I mean, clearly it was all wrong because we've seen life expectancy in South Africa, jumped to former President Jacob Zumer's great credit it was the one something he did, you know, put ARVs into into state hospitals and life expectancy went up by nine years.
Have you ever sort of come across a rational explanation for why so many people were against them.
I don't understand the denial, And maybe it was a combination of you know, of you know, thinking that big farmer was trying to make money and that these drugs were toxic and it was a way to offload and to rectivirals into low middle income country settings. So there was this anti colonial approach that may have driven it, and a distrust of big farmer who do make profits
as well. So I think there was a combination of that as well as you know, trying to not believe that people were dying around you and that there were other reasons that was driving the epidemic, like malnutrition or solenium deficiency. So people tried to find other reasons why children were dying. And we even had the age denialists come to Barraguana Hospital and we showed him a child with full blown aids and he looked at the child and said, oh, this is the worst case of solenium
deficiency I've ever seen. In my life said this is not this is HIV. And so it was a very hard time because even though you would take someone to award and you'd think that they would be moved by fick children, and they were, you know, and these these were Western scientists who also had this difiling view.
It's astonishing that it all happened. You. You mentioned earlier how a young woman finishing school at Brocksburg High who was very clever would be basically that the path was a sort of scholarship to be a teacher. And when you said you were looking at medicine, people went sort of their dear, you know, you didn't use that phrase, but a kind of condescension. And I mean, it's been interesting to watch how people have described you over the year.
So Time magazine said you're one of the world's most influential people. Sometimes people have described you as one of the most influential women in the world. Some women I've spoken to have been recognized in that way say they're quite irritating to be described as an influential woman and would rather be an influential person. Do you have a view one way or another. I would like to think that very very few young women who want to be doctors are treated in the way you were treated back then.
Speaking to Professor Glenda Gray this evening in about her career and her time as an HIV researcher, pediatrician and of course someone who's played an immense role in our society. Glenda, I'd like to talk a little bit about COVID nineteen. And we were all watching what you were doing, what everyone in your field was doing, and there was intense
pressure for a vaccine when it started. When COVID nineteen started and you realized we were going into a lockdown and all the rest were you confident that they would in fact be a vaccine for COVID nineteen.
So we knew that. So we had been working in HIV vaccine field in the moment we knew that there was a new circulating strain of coronavirus. A group of people got together who started started meeting every Saturday evening or just Saturday evening my time, but it was obviously in the US in the afternoon, and we started planning how we were going to pivot from HIV vaccines to COVID vaccines and the platforms we were going to use.
So I was really lucky. You know. We were on course at Bonnie Graham at the v r C, the nr H, people from Operation Walk Speed, people like uh the Jay and Poor Stuffers from J and J, and
we started designing trials. At that stage, we only wanted to do the trials in the United States, and we were working with a wholder of people to try and bring the studies into South Africa to be a mighty Who's now that dinner at Wards University managed to get Taddoc's COVID vaccine trial into South Africa, which the mr C funded, and our work to Poor Stuffers at the at J and J, who then decided to use South Africa and the Americas to do the twenty six Jane
j COVID vaccine. And he did this because we had a relationship. We were working on an HIV vaccine together and he was he was very happy to work with South Africa to help us move the vaccine program forward.
So very early on we knew that in South Africa we couldn't ourselves develop a COVID vaccine and that we would have to partner with international people and international scientists to drive our vaccine agenda in South Africa, and so I think we're very fortunate to have relationships with Taddocks, with Jane j and with Visor. The enabled us to
do the clinical trials in South Africa. And it was very important because obviously we were we had strains that were emerging before anyone else and which were different, and so we could rapidly show that these vaccines were working with new emerging strains of COVID like beta and armor cron.
I remember I have this memory of watching it live on TV, and tell me if I get this right, but I think it was you and Linda Gail Becker, also a professor of course, carrying the first doses, and the first person received a dose was a nurse, Alisa Giddy Diosi. Someone else received the second dose, of course, that was the president. It must have been a tremendous moment, I mean an incredible moment to sort of, you know, be leading that in South Africa.
It was an amazing and swelling moment. We had to fly the vaccine down. We were rushing from the airport to Carlie cher I was trying to throw the vaccine in the ambulance because we knew we had to vaccinate the President in ten minutes. He was waiting. He had we go to Parliament and we were speeding through Carli chair in an ambulance and when we got to College Hospital we ran into the pharmacy. The vaccine had been thought and we could draw it up and rush to
vaccinate the President and the nurse and the doctor. And you were very important because looking back then, having the President I'm agreeing to be vaccinated together with the Minister of Health and the healthcare workers was critical for vaccine acceptance in South Africa.
Very quickly, if you can. The major challenge now obviously funding is a major challenge and perhaps worse now than it's been for some time. But for you is it's still medically HIV eight.
Well for me, obviously HIV curR is an important part of my next journey as well as finding an HIV vaccine, But we also have an increasing incidence of cancer in South Africa, particularly amongst those who are HIV infected. So sorry, I'm visited for the next five to ten years to be working in those two fields, HIV and cancer.
I really appreciate the time tonight and thank you for taking the time, and thank you for everything that you've done for our society of the years, you've made such an immense contribution. Thank you. That's a pleasure, Professor Glenda Gray. They're very sort of humble. It's a pleasure. I mean, the things that she's done for our society are just immense. On the Money Show this evening