Shahid Jameel, Virologist, and part of genome mapping in India quits panel after criticizing the government

Last updated on May 21st, 2021 at 05:32 am

India’s top virologist Shahid Jameel has reportedly quit his position in the genome mapping panel. He was in the media for criticizing the Indian government for how it handles the coronavirus pandemic.

The statements which Jameel was famous for giving about the pandemic were considered to be extremely important; the head used to work with the country’s genome sequencing.

Most experts say that genome sequencing work is being executed at a very slow rate in the country and it gathered speed only after INSACOG was announced to monitor the process. The former chair of the scientific advisory said that he is not obliged to give the reason by the forms when Reuters contacted him earlier. He merely confirmed the information saying that it is completed right and I have nothing to add on the matter.

Next to Jameel, Renu Swarup, who is the secretary of the department of Biotechnology that oversees INSACOG could not be immediately reached after the information came out. Jameel’s piece in the New York Times brought all the attention of him as he criticized the government’s ways of considering the pandemic as a problem- solution sought of the situation.

He has also been part of a lot of Indian media groups where he opened up about how the center failed to contain the spread of the virus in the country, especially during the second wave. He pointed out issues such as low testings, slow vaccination rate, issues that are only being raised now but most experts.

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“All of these measures have wide support among my fellow scientists in India. But they are facing stubborn resistance to evidence-based policymaking,” he said in one of the reports where he elaborated on how a bigger and stronger healthcare worker’s force can control the situation to an extent.

He stressed that whatever the situation has arisen due to the pandemic will leave a permanent scar on India and people will begin to see it as a total loss of implementing the data-based decisions given the huge population the country has. As per reports, Jameel had already informed the government about a new, more dangerous variant of the virus in March and was unhappy with how the center reacted after it.

Jameel had also said that there are a lot of good doctors who are working day and night to help patients but they deal with issues of the health of the patients, they cannot handle logistics of the life essentials like Oxygen and ventilator beds while doing all that. It has become a really stressful situation for doctors, he added.