Scientists associated with INSACOG, the government panel that conducts research on different variants of the coronavirus, said they were surprised at noted virologist Shahid Jameel's decision to quit the group and wondered whether he was disillusioned with the government's handling of the pandemic. He quit days after he had said that scientists were facing "stubborn resistance to evidence-based policy making".
Jameel announced his plan to step down in a meeting of INSACOG held on Friday, said four officials and scientists who were part of it. Requesting anonymity, they said Jameel's decision was not anticipated. Calls and messages to Jameel went unanswered. A scientist said the virologist did not give any reason for his resignation. "In a meeting on Friday, he simply said that he was stepping down as the head of INSACOG," said the scientist who attended the meeting.
Another scientist who attended the meeting said, "Maybe, he was upset with the government (over its handling of the pandemic)." The third scientist said the reason behind his decision to quit is not clear and added that Jameel's exit would not have much effect on the working of the consortium. "The decision was not anticipated," the fourth scientist said, adding that he did not have any idea about it before Jameel's announcement on Friday.
The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG) is a grouping of 10 national laboratories that was established by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on December 25 last year after the emergence of new variants of the coronavirus like the ones first detected in the UK, South Africa and Brazil.
These labs are National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani; Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar; National Institute of Virology, Pune; National Centre For Cell Science, Pune; Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad; Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad; National Centre For Biological Sciences, Bengaluru; National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience, Bengaluru; Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi; and National Centre for Disease Control, Delhi.
INSACOG has been carrying out genomic sequencing and analysis of circulating COVID-19 viruses, and correlating epidemiological trends with genomic variants. However, it came under criticism after the second wave of coronavirus swept the country.