Shabir A. Madhi

Shabir Ahmed Madhi, (born 1966) is a South African physician who is professor of vaccinology and director of the South African Medical Research Council Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, and National Research Foundation/Department of Science and Technology Research Chair in Vaccine Preventable Diseases. In January 2021, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Madhi was executive director of South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases from 2011 to 2017, and has served on several WHO committees in roles pertinent to vaccines and pneumonia. In 2018, he co-founded the African Leadership in Vaccinology Expertise (ALIVE) and was appointed Chair of South Africa's National Advisory Group on Immunization (NAGI). His research has included studies on the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and rotavirus vaccine, and in pregnant women, the influenza and respiratory syncytial virus vaccines.

Since the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Madhi has been leading COVID-19 vaccine trials in South Africa, including the first in Africa. In 2021 he stated that the first and foremost method of ending COVID-19 in South Africa is to implement a mass vaccination programme.

Early life and education Madhi was born in 1966. His father was a teacher and mother a housewife. Initially aspiring to becoming an engineer, he opted to accept a bursary to study medicine and was initially reluctant to persist with his medical education. During this time, with encouragement from Glenda Gray, he applied for a post under professor Keith Klugman, to work on vaccines for pneumonia. These units have been rebranded as the MRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit (VIDA).

He was executive director of South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases from 2011 to 2017, and has served on several WHO committees in roles pertinent to vaccines and pneumonia.

Pneumonia vaccine His research has included studies on the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. This research led to the WHO recommendations on the delivery of this vaccine in low and middle-income countries. It was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2010. The paper provided one of the key pieces of evidence for the WHO recommendations of universal rotavirus vaccination. His work showed that the risk of flu halved in women given the flu vaccine. In addition, the risk to their newborns in the first 24 weeks of life was also reduced. The findings were presented at the 16th International Congress on Infectious Diseases and he reported that his "data support the recent WHO recommendation in terms of prioritizing pregnant women for influenza vaccination, not just for the protection of the mother, but protection of the infant as well". Later, he became involved in the clinical development of a vaccine against Group B streptococcus for pregnant women.

COVID-19 Since the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he has been leading COVID-19 vaccine trials in South Africa, including the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the first COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial in the continent of Africa. Asserting that South Africa's second wave in December 2020 is largely driven by mass gatherings and changing people's behaviour, rather than solely on the new variant, he has called for a wider coverage of COVID-19 vaccination. His co-authored publication on results of a large clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine suggest that the vaccine is safe and effective. In 2021 he made it clear that the first and foremost method of ending COVID-19 in South Africa is to implement a mass vaccination programme. On 1 January 2021 he tweeted "Ability of vaccines to impact on the pandemic is directly related to how soon you can get approx 50–60% of the population vaccinated."

Selected publications Madhi has authored more than 350 publications between 1997 and 2018,

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