India announced on Friday that it would require visitors from Britain to quarantine regardless of their vaccination status. This comes after weeks of talks to reverse a similar move by Britain appeared deadlocked.
The British government relaxed quarantine requirements for vaccinated visitors from more than a dozen countries last month, except India. The British government’s decision to exclude Indians fully inoculated with Covishield, an Indian-manufactured version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that Britain uses caused a stir in India, and the government threatened retaliation.
Harsh Vardhan Shringla, called earlier called the step by the British government a “discriminatory” move, and the two countries have been in talks since nearly two weeks. The foreign secretary said that Britain was essentially not recognizing the very vaccine that India had given it five million doses of when Britain was struggling with its inoculation drive.
The British high commissioner in New Delhi, Alex Ellis, while addressing the media said that the vaccine itself was not the issue but it was India’s vaccine certification app, CoWIN, and further added that the developers of CoWIN and Britain’s National Health Service were in talks to resolve it.