FMD Response SA welcomes the precautionary suspension at Onderstepoort Biological Products and calls for the same independent scrutiny of South Africa’s FMD testing system, where one institution still wears every hat.
FMD Response SA welcomes the action taken by the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Willie Aucamp, on allegations of misconduct relating to the pricing of Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) vaccines at Onderstepoort Biological Products (OBP). The suspension of the entity’s Acting Chief Executive Officer is precautionary, no finding has been made against him, and the process must now be allowed to run fairly and independently.
The vaccine at the centre of the allegations was procured for the national FMD response and paid for with public money. When one arm of the state supplies another the only protection is oversight.
FMD Response SA spokesperson Andrew Morphew said the Minister’s intervention showed that oversight at work.
“This was not farmers being overcharged. This was the Department of Agriculture paying the State’s own company with taxpayer money. The Minister has now done what oversight is supposed to do, and we welcome it.”
For most of this outbreak, South Africa’s FMD response has run through single channels. Vaccine supply was the first. It was opened by agreement in July, and farmers and their veterinarians may now buy vaccine directly. OBP’s vaccine pricing is now under scrutiny.
Testing remains a single channel.
Onderstepoort Biological Products and the Agricultural Research Council’s Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute are separate institutions. The problem is the same: a critical function of the FMD response concentrated in one channel, with no external check.
The Agricultural Research Council’s institute at Onderstepoort confirms the country’s outbreaks, performs its FMD testing, advises government on vaccine selection, and manufactures its own FMD vaccine for the same response. It is a player in the vaccine market and the referee at the same time.
“No institution should wear all of those hats,” said Morphew. “A routine share of South Africa’s samples should go to the world reference laboratory for FMD at Pirbright in the United Kingdom, so that our results are checked outside our borders. That is not a criticism of anyone. It is how confidence is built.”
This is not a question about the good faith of any institution. It is a question about whether the country has a way to check. The Minister has shown this week what independent scrutiny looks like when a critical function sits in one channel. The same standard belongs in the laboratory system.
No institution should be the sole judge of a response it also supplies.
FMD Response SA remains committed to working constructively with the Minister of Agriculture, the Department, state and private veterinarians, vaccine suppliers, industry organisations and livestock producers to control FMD and restore South Africa’s animal-health status.
