COVID-19: India’s medical diplomacy gathers goodwill at low cost

Sandeep Dikshit
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, April 17

India has mustered much international goodwill at a very cheap price by opening the exports of (HCQ) and paracetamol tablets to at least 100 countries.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi relented after phone conversations with Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Jair Bolsonaro whose countries were at the time reeling from a peaking of the Covid epidemic in their respective countries.

HCQ, which climbed the charts after Trump said it was a wonder cure, is out of patent and hence cheap to manufacture.

But it is manufactured on a large scale in India because of the widespread prevalence of malaria and its use for rheumatoid arthritis.

In comparison, China is not just fencing off attacks about having suppressed information about the spread of virus, its medical diplomacy is backfiring because of complaints of defective testing kits, ventilators and personal protection equipment (PPE).

India has decided to stay away from purchasing Chinese PPE even as there are reports of nearly 90,000 PPE kits from China failing quality and safety tests as did smaller consignments of PPE, many from China.

Sources said the international goodwill may have cost India less than Rs 300 crore so far.

A very small proportion of it by volume comprises HCQ while paracetamol tablets and granules form bulk of the supplies though it is the former that is more in the news.

Some heads of government who have thanked India are from UK, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Spain, Nepal, Mauritius and Seychelles.

Interestingly HCQ is not a wonder cure for Covid and its serious side-effects on the heart have been emphasised by several government departments, including the Chandigarh administration, which said, “If at all it [HCQ] has any role, it is in Covid patients where it may enhance the response to supportive treatment though there is no sufficient evidence to substantiate it.”

“At the moment, the drug cannot be recommended to be consumed by public for prevention of Covid infection,” it advised.