India's eminent virologist, Dr Shahid Jameel, announced his resignation as chairperson of the SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium Group (INSACOG).
Dr Jameel, one of the most prominent voices throughout the pandemic, was made head of the Genomics Consortium Group, which was formed in January this year to identify the genome structure of the COVID-19 virus and track the spread of its variants.
In a text message to Reuters, Dr Jameel refused to give the reason for his resignation, while confirming that he quit on Friday, 14 May.
The announcement comes only a few days after Dr Jameel wrote a piece in The New York Times criticising the government for not paying heed to scientists' warnings. He also questioned the government for not making data accessible to scientists and the laxity in its COVID policies.
In the article, he talks about the "stubborn resistance to evidence-based policymaking" that scientists in India are facing.
Reacting to Dr Jameel's resignation, his fellow researchers and scientists extended their support to him, expressing their disappointment with the situation.
Public Health Researcher and Editor of Indian Journal of Medical Ethics Amar Jessani took to Twitter to back Dr Jameel's decision, calling him the "one scientist with self-respect”.
Dr Anant Bhan, Adjunct Professor & Researcher in Bioethics at Mangaluru’s Yenepoya University, compared Dr Jameel's tenure with that of Dr Fauci's in the US, noting how the latter was able to survive both Democratic and Republican governments, "while focussing on science-based policy-making and advocacy”.
Health economist and consultant to World Health Organisation (WHO) Dr Rijo M John, on the other hand, drew parallels between Dr Jameel's resignation and that of PC Mohanan and JV Meenakshi who had to quit the National Statistical Commission in 2019, adding, "data and science become your enemies when they don't support the narrative".
Patralekha Chatterjee, journalist and visiting Fellow at the Yale Law School and School of Public Health, called the government's reluctance to invest in genome surveillance an "extremely troubling sign".
Add to this, researcher Professor Somashekhar Nimbalkar pointed to a pattern in the way scientists in India, who are critical of the state, were "getting shunted out".
Dr Shahid Jameel currently serves as the director of Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University. He has also been the CEO of Welcome Trust DBT India Alliance.
(This piece was originally published in Fit.)
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