Let’s hear from Zulfiqar Bhutta, University of Toronto, about this 2021 article published in Archives of Disease in Childhood “Open access publications were key to information sharing during the pandemic and should be the norm moving forward with mechanisms that enable scientists from LMICs to publish their findings.”
Professor Zulfiqar A Bhutta is the Robert Harding Inaugural Chair in Global Child Health & Policy at the Centre for Global Child Health, University of Toronto and the Distinguished University Professor and Founding Director of its Institute for Global Health & Development at the Aga Khan University, unique joint appointments.
What inspired you to pursue research in this particular area?
At the time when COVID spread across the world in record time with uncertainty and chaos, there were scant early reports on infections in children and respective outcomes, including the spectre of multi- system inflammatory syndrome (MISC) that was beginning to rear its head. With limited funding and no clear direction from global agencies, we established a voluntary working group on COVID-19 in women and children with the explicit purpose of collating and synthesizing evidence for policy and action. As it emerged some of our earlier findings on varying severity and outcomes related to COVID-19 infections in children in low- and middle-income countries were prescient in terms of what eventually emerged from several subsequent studies.
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