India joins China, other BRICS nations to call for avoiding politicisation of Covid origin search

Amid the row between China and the United States over the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday joined the communist country’s President Xi Jinping and the other BRICS leaders to stress that study of emergence of novel pathogens should not be politicised.

The BRICS leaders recognised the importance of safe, efficacious, accessible and affordable anti-Covid-19 vaccines and noted the ongoing discussions in the World Trade Organization on a proposal mooted by India and South Africa for Intellectual Property Rights waiver on the jabs to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus and use of flexibilities of the TRIPS Agreement and the Doha Declaration on TRIPS Agreement and Public Health.

“We note that the cooperation on study of origins of the SARS-CoV-2 is an important aspect of the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic,” Modi, Xi and the other BRICS leaders said in a joint statement issued after a virtual summit of the five-nation-bloc. “We support science-based, inclusive of broad expertise, transparent, and timely processes, free from politicisation or interference, to strengthen international capabilities to better understand the emergence of novel pathogens and to help prevent future pandemics.”

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The summit was also attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Beijing recently dismissed as unscientific a report compiled by the United States intelligence agencies, which was purportedly inconclusive and did not rule out the theory that the virus leaked out from a laboratory at Wuhan in China due to an accident. China accused the US of ignoring and abandoning studies by the World Health Organization (WHO) for “political purposes”.

Wuhan was the ground zero of the Covid-19 pandemic.

New Delhi had on May 28 last tacitly asked Beijing to cooperate with the WHO and allow it to conduct further investigation into the origin of the Covid-19 virus. The WHO had earlier this year revealed that its investigators had experienced difficulties in accessing raw data while studying the origin of the Covid-19 virus in China. This had prompted the US and the 13 other nations to issue a joint statement, expressing concern over delay and difficulties experienced by the WHO experts in accessing “complete, original data and samples” while conducting the probe in China.

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