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Students protest relief in the school budget at the Central University of Ecuador on May 5.
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When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the United States and Europe in February, scientists at the Mexican Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) took action. They temporarily switched one of their study laboratories to a diagnostic clinic, and by mid-March, when the bodies began to accumulate in Mexico, they had introduced seven other COVID-19-related projects.
Then a crisis broke out for now. On April 2, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered the completion of public acceptance as true with funds, which finance special and long-term projects at Cinvestav, a public institute with nine campuses that employs another 7,500 people, and other institutions. Three weeks later, he announced a 75% relief in the operational budgets of some federal institutions, adding Cinvestav, which would have forced the institute to close its doors, said Cinvestav director José Mustre de León.
Another coup followed on May 14, when the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt) asked scientists to donate their monthly federal supplement, a typical portion of Mexican researchers’ incomes, to the country’s fitness formula in the face of reaction to COVID-19. “Not only would we not have cash, but we would also have to withdraw cash from our own pockets,” says Gabriela Olmedo, genetic engineer and director of the Irapuato campus at Cinvestav.
Mexican scientists are not feeling the conflicting pressures of the pandemic. Across Latin America, studies have rushed to bring their experience to the worst public fitness crisis in a century and have shown that decades of investment in studies, adding the ability to conduct giant clinical trials, have paid off. “We have necessarily shown that we have wisdom in the country that can be put at the service of society as a whole,” says Aisén Etcheverry, who heads Chile’s National Research and Development Agency. At the same time, the pandemic has created serious economic and monetary unrest for the region, which faces an expected 5.3% contraction in gross domestic product this year. The resulting cuts severely affected science and threatened effortless achievements.
Latin America comprises less than 10% of the global population yet accounts for nearly one-third of reported COVID-19 deaths. In deaths and case counts, Brazil ranks second only to the United States; Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Mexico have been hard hit as well. The fallout could push an additional 16 million residents of the region into extreme poverty, according to a report from the United Nations.
The expansion of fundamental studies in Latin America, achieved through decades of investment in many countries, has placed the region in a better position to retaliate, says Hernando García Martínez, director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute of Biological Resources Research in Bogota, Colombia. “We would have had the ability to respond to such a direct and genuine challenge to society as COVID-19,” says García Martínez, who describes the crisis as a “fascinating challenge.”
In early April, Colombian researchers were among the first to publish a clinical trial of convalescent plasma, an antibody-rich serum of other people who have recovered, for patients with COVID-19. More than 190 other clinical trials are underway in Latin America. Researchers from Brazil, Mexico and Argentina have joined the race to expand their own vaccines and are partners in the Phase II and III trials of foreign vaccine leaders.
In Argentina and Chile, the political position of science has been strengthened in the crisis. Argentine President Alberto Fernández, elected in 2019, was already adopting a pro-science approach, taking into account his clinical advisors and promising more investments, a replacement for his predecessor, who implemented devastating budget cuts and degraded the Ministry of Science to a subsection of the ministry. Education. Now the public sees that prioritizing science is helping Argentina respond to the pandemic, argues Juan Pablo Paz, secretary of clinical and technological coordination. “Of course, the pandemic means we’ll face delays and other challenges,” he says, “but I think science will remain in a more powerful position than before.”
In Chile, Etcheverry redirected his company, which is part of a new ministry of science and is only 3 months old when the pandemic occurred, to provide coVID-19 tests and other aid for pandemic reaction and contributed $3 million to track the social effects of the crisis. such as increased domestic violence and setbacks in student learning. Show that science can simply “generate a verbal exchange within the government that has never taken a stand before,” etcheverry says. “This is definitely a turning point in the way the sector is perceived.”
However, the economic crisis has saved Chilean science. Scholarships Chile, a scholarship program that budgets foreign studies for budding researchers, in exchange for its promise to bring back experience to Chile, which has stimulated the expansion of many clinical fields in Chile, has been partially suspended. “Freezing or wondering just because we’re in a crisis is the right decision, because those are the things that prepare you for the next one,” says César Fuentes, an astronomer at the University of Chile.
The setting is darker in Peru, says Gisella Orjeda, former president of the National Council of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation (CONCYTEC). During his tenure, Orjeda helped build CONCYTEC’s annual budget of just $5 million to about $40 million, but that ‘still isn’t enough,” he says, critical projects in conservation, fitness and crisis prevention remain unfunded. Now the government has suspended some investment programs; As of the end of July, CONCYTEC had spent only 16% of its 2020 budget.
In neighboring Ecuador, scholars have long learned not to rely on unpredictable federal investments. The pandemic seems to be aimed at worsening the issues, says Diego Quiroga, dean of studies at the University of San Francisco in Quito. He fears that a source of income for his college, tuition fees, will be minimized if the economic crisis eliminates student tuition. New threats of cuts to higher education and the economic crisis have led scientists to redouble their efforts for safe investment through participation with scholars from the United States and the European Union, he says. “If we don’t look for investments abroad, we may have nothing,” says Quiroga, who predicts that the pandemic will lead to an exodus of young scientists. As Mustre de León says: “We are wasting a total generation of scientists.”
In Mexico, after a protest by researchers, academics and the media, the president ordered Conacyt officials to abandon his request for donations. Cinvestav has been allowed to keep its public budget accepted as true for the time being and is negotiating a smaller budget reduction. But other federal establishments will still see cuts, and the episode has left scientists shocked and worried. “If we hadn’t had this budget-cutting environment, we might have done a lot more,” says Mustre de Leon. The seasoning highlighted the ease with which years of defending scientific investment in Mexico can suddenly get rid of. “We still have a lot of fragility,” he says. And the pandemic has annoyed an already strained relationship between the clinical network and the director of the Conacyt and the progressive biologist Mara Elena Alvarez-Buylla Roces, who has moved to quiet, independent voices in what some see as an authoritarian effort to centralize clinical policy. “Elena has no leadership because she didn’t deserve it,” Olmedo says. (Conacyt, which budgeted up to 77% of Mexican science, did not respond to Science’s multiple requests for comments.
Elsewhere, too, the pandemic has deepened the divisions between scientists and politicians. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has continually questioned clinical experience, minimizing the severity of the pandemic and selling treatments without evidence. In Venezuela, scientists’ alarms have led to threats from senior officials. And in Colombia, seven senators sent a letter on July 27 to President Ivon Duque Marquez complaining about the lack of leadership of the pandemic of Mabel Torres Torres, who heads the new Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and has already been embroiled in scandals for its promotion. unproven cancer treatment. “It’s an absent ministry,” says immunologist Gabriela Delgado Murcia of the National University of Colombia in Bogota. “Sorry.” Two days later, the Ministry of Finance proposed 35% relief in the country’s clinical budget for 2021.
Despite the difficult situations posed by the pandemic, García Martínez remains hopeful. Years of limited investment have taught Latin American researchers to do much with very little, he says, a useful skill in those days. “We’re very adaptive.”
Rodrigo Pérez Ortega is a science journalist for life sciences, medicine, fitness and academia.
Lindzi Wessel is a company founded in Santiago, Chile.
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