Duni Sawadogo promotes the "Women and Science" project in her country and fights against the trafficking of counterfeit medicines that especially affect the most vulnerable.

– Supernatural Ivorian Ivorian scientist, Duni Sawadogohas been recognized, this year, with the Award Harambee to the Advancement and Equality of African Women.

Sawadogo in her country by promoting the training of women university students and scientists, and also by promoting the Women and Science" project. Another of the aspects that have made it worthy of this award is the fight against trafficking in counterfeit medicines which mainly affects the most vulnerable, such as the poorest women and children, and which, according to Dr. Sawadogo, generates more money than drugs and has a special and worrying incidence in Africa.

Awarding of the prize

The award will be presented, at a online gala on March 4by H.R.H. Doña Teresa de Borbón dos Sicilias, Honorary President of Harambee and D. Nicolas Zombré, Group Chief Executive Officer Pierre Fabre in Spain, which sponsors this award.

Biography of Duni Sawadogo

Duni Sawadogo, D. in Pharmacy from the University of Abidjan. y Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Hematology from the University of Navarra is Professor of Biological Hematology and Principal Investigator at the School of Pharmacy of the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Felix Houphouet Boigny University, of Abidjan. During the pandemic, Dr. Sawadogo has been appointed as a member of the Steering Committee for the AIRP (Autorité Ivoirienne de Régulation Pharmaceutique). A body similar to the European Medicines Agency, which has approved covid-19 vaccines.

Similarly, AIRP makes safe, effective and inexpensive medicines available to the population, because in Côte d'Ivoire, as in most developing countries, there is a large market for counterfeit and substandard medicines sold outside the official distribution circuit. It also works to promote the creation and development of the pharmaceutical industry.

Harambee Project

Harambee -which in Swahili means all together- is an international project of solidarity with sub-Saharan Africa that collaborates with educational, health or assistance projects, promoted and carried out by
Africans themselves in their own countries. All its volunteers work in solidarity, without receiving any remuneration. In 2021, Harambee will develop projects in Cameroon, Congo, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda.

If someone were asked on the street if they thought that the whole issue of the pandemic caused by Covid-19 was a simple matter, few would answer in the affirmative.

More than a year has passed since the first cases of what has quickly become a worldwide epidemic were described, and many questions remain unanswered, despite the fact that a large part of the global scientific world has set to work on it in a way that is difficult to find precedents in the history of medicine and scientific research.

It is striking that so many categorical statements appear on social networks about the characteristics of the virus, the immunological reaction it provokes or the management that should be made of the pandemic. In addition to all these questions, there have been some that refer to the ethical aspects of coronavirus infection.

The morality of vaccines

In recent months much has been written about Covid-19 vaccines and their connection with abortion. The subject is a serious one and for this reason the Note published on December 21 last year by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the morality of the use of certain Covid-19 vaccines. In reality, what this Note says, at a theoretical level, had already been said by the same Congregation in 2008, in numbers 34 and 35 of the Instruction Dignitas personaein dealing with the use of illicit human "biological material" of illicit origin. However, it was opportune to remember it, because many Catholics are unaware of this text and have doubts about the morality of the use of vaccines against Covid-19.. 

Different degrees of responsibility

The Note writes something that has been recalled in recent documents of the Magisterium on bioethics: that the Church has no particular competence in scientific matters, and all it does is to offer a light for the discernment of ethical questions. In this case, the question that arises is whether it is licit to use a vaccine in whose production or validation process cell lines from fetal tissue derived from induced abortions have been used.

The brief Note explains, following Dignitas personaewhich in the use of cell lines derived from abortion there are different degrees of liabilityHe gives as an example the different moral assessment of possible actions within a large pharmaceutical company, depending on whether it is the managers who propose its use in certain research or the professionals who do not have decision-making power over the materials to be used.

It then offers the answer to the moral problem that some Christians put on pointing out that it is "morally acceptable to use Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process."provided that alternative vaccines are not available. made without the use of such cell lines of illicit origin. This condition is currently met in most cases, as potential users cannot choose the type of vaccine, as it depends on the governmental organization.

Could there be cooperation to evil?

The reason used in the document to justify this response is that the type of cooperation in the wrongdoing that could be incurred is remote. When speaking of cooperation to evil (the document uses the moral category "passive material cooperation"), it is not assumed that using the vaccine today implies any causal link with the abortion that was performed thirty or forty years ago, but rather that the use of these cell lines may in some way promote the use of embryonic or fetal material in laboratories.and justify or make more tolerable the destruction of embryos or abortions related to such use.  

Moreover, the Note goes on to explain, the moral duty to avoid this type of cooperation is not binding if there is a serious cause, as in this case to avoid the spread of the infection with all its negative consequences. It is important to understand that the reasoning of the Vatican Congregation is not of a proportionalist type, since it starts from the consideration that the object of the act being carried out, that is, the immunization of the population, is morally good. Moreover, as is also explained, this response does not legitimize either the abortions that gave rise to these cell lines or the use of these cell lines..

Is vaccination mandatory?

Another issue addressed by the Note is that of mandatory vaccination.. Here it is important to distinguishing the legal level from the ethical level. The first refers to the indications that the public authority requires from citizens. For the time being, in countries where the vaccine has begun to be used, it is not required by law: it is simply advised. But in some places, or for certain categories of subjects, the public authority could make vaccination compulsory if it considers it necessary for the public good. From an ethical point of view, it is clear that there is a certain moral obligation to avoid infecting others and, as in other infectious diseases, the safest way would be vaccination.. For this reason, the Note states that "the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to protect one's own health. duty to pursue the common good".

And what about poor countries?

A final ethical problem of no little importance that the Note mentions, albeit very succinctly, is the one that refers to the universal access to vaccines. He speaks of the moral imperative to "ensure that vaccines that are effective and safe from a health point of view, and ethically acceptable, are also accessible to the poorest countries and at no excessive cost to them". A more developed presentation on this subject is given in the recent "Note from the Vatican Commission Covid-19 in collaboration with the Pontifical Academy for Life Vaccine for all. 20 points for a fairer and healthier world" (29.12.2020).

RelatedBorges, a writer in search of meaning

We continue following the clues of the concept of God in the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. In the collection of poems, In Praise of the ShadowWe extract some verses from "Fragments of an apocryphal gospel": 

12. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they see God.

15. Let the light of a lamp be lighted, though no man see it. God will see it.

32. God is more generous than men and will measure them with another measure.

49. Happy are those who keep in memory the words of Virgil or of Christ, for they will give light to their days.

In these fragments, Borges carries out a kind of imitation of some evangelical phrases, and the 32 could be a variation of "with the measure you measure you will be measured", but to say that God is more generous than men and will measure them with another measure is a distinctly Christian and biblical thought: God's mercy, God's love and God's intelligence far exceed our expectations.

At The eye of the tigers (1972) we read a fragment of the poem "Religio medici, 1643": 

Defend me, Lord. (The vocative does not imply Nobody. It is only one word of this exercise that reluctance carves out.

From time to time Borges wants to make it clear that he is an agnostic, that he doubts, that he ignores what the word actually means. Mr.In other cases, however, it is used without any kind of footnote.

At The Deep Rose (1975) there is a poem titled very significantly "De que nada se sabe" (Of which nothing is known):

Perhaps human destiny
of short joys and long sorrows
is an instrument of Another. We ignore it;
giving God's name does not help us.

He writes "it does not help us", but in Borges there is a serene search without stridency throughout his life. There is an inquiry, a speculation about meaning, time, eternity, death, life.

At The Iron Coin (1976) we read in a poem entitled "The End":

God or Maybe or Nobody, I ask you

its inexhaustible image, not oblivion.

He doubts but does not deny, he doubts but seeks: "I ask you / his inexhaustible image, not oblivion". Here he does not want oblivion. Here he asks for non-forgetfulness. Perhaps Spinoza has taught him oblivion and perhaps his own mind, his own readings, and his own freedom of thought make him think that it cannot all end in oblivion.

In the poem "Einar Tambarskelver" we read:  

Odin or the red Thor or the White Christ...
Little matter the names and their gods;
there is no other obligation but to be brave

This thought again has a stoic aftertaste: I don't know who he is, but I'm looking for him.

"In Iceland the dawn," another poem, we read:

It is the shadow glass in which you look
God, he doesn't have a face.

God does not have a face, the God of the philosophers certainly does not have a face. The God of the Old Testament does not have a face either, although he sometimes presents himself with anthropomorphic attitudes. The only face that God really has is Christ, the visible image of the invisible God. But Borges's philosophical aftertaste tends to impose itself. 

In "Some Coins" there is a short poem inspired by a verse from Genesis:

GENESIS, IX, 13

The arc of the Lord crosses the sphere

and blesses us. In the great pure arc

are the blessings of the future,

but there is also my love, who waits.

It is a poem inspired by Genesis and therefore fully in tune with the biblical text, and Borges glosses it because he is also rewriting in some way a book that fascinates him: the Bible. 

There is a poem dedicated to Baruch Spinoza.

Someone builds God in the twilight.
A man begets God. [...] 

The sorcerer insists and carves
God with delicate geometry;
from his illness, from his nothingness,
continues to erect God with the word.

We can consider this poem by Borges quite sincere in that he is probably describing what Spinoza or many philosophers do: construct a God to their measure, to their rational measure, to their geometric measure, and perhaps -following Borges with the perhaps- it is not the authentic God.

Another poem: "For a version of I King".

The path is fatal as the arrow
but in the cracks is God, who lurks.

He stresses once again the force of destiny, but in that crack "there is God". 

In "You are not the others":

There is no pity in the Fairy
and God's night is infinite.

The same idea of infinite dissolution that we saw at the beginning of our tour through Borges' poetry. 

At La Cifra -In 1981, we read a curious poem dedicated to an angel with many biblical resonances:

Lord, that at the end of my days on earth
I did not dishonor the Angel.

It seems that it is the angel of paradise, the angel that expels Adam and Eve, and ends the poem with this authentic prayer: "Lord, at the end of my days on Earth, may I not dishonor the Angel". In another poem of the same collection of poems The figure entitled "To run or to be" we read: 

Perhaps on the other side of death

I will know if I have been a word or someone.

This text seems to us decisive: "a word or someone". What sediment has Occam's nominalism really had in modern and contemporary philosophy? Perhaps it is a cliché, but perhaps because it is a cliché it is true. "Whether I have been a word or someone": all that diatribe of universals. But Borges says "perhaps" on the other side of death I will know if I have been a word, a flatus vocis or someone. Because if God exists and God is on the other side, and I am in His mind not as a file in a computer memory, but I am in His mind as a being dear to Him, I will have regained a full identity. 

The Conjured (1985), the last collection of poems, we read in a poem entitled "La tarde": 

it may well be that our short life

is a fleeting reflection of the divine.

It seems that at the end of his life Borges' search for meaning, his search for God, is becoming more and more accentuated. And in one of his last poems entitled "Góngora" he writes:

Such spoils

have banished God, who is Three and is One,

of my awakened heart. [...]

Who will tell me if in the secret archive

of God are the letters of my name?

I want to get back to the common things:

Water, bread, a pitcher, roses...

He returns to the previous idea of whether I am a word or someone: Who will tell me if the letters of my name are in God's secret archive? Until the end of his life, Borges, starting from an agnosticism induced by his father's education, by his readings, leaves an open door to a God in whom the essence of his life may lie. 

RelatedBorges, a writer in search of meaning