Vaccination row erupted when UK did not give any cognisance to Indian vaccinations and dropped out the name of India from the list of countries who will not require quarantine after being travelling with full vaccination certificates.
The United Kingdom finally announced changes in its travel and quarantine rules and said that the UK now recognises Covishield as a vaccine. This new statement comes amid a growing row over UK not recognising the Covishield vaccine made in India.
Earlier, the new UK’s policy was not considering travellers from India as fully vaccinated if they have received their vaccine doses in India itself.
On 17th September, 2021 the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps announced the new travelling policies.
UK government replaced their traffic light system to a single red list of countries and territories which will be allowed to travel to UK from monday 4 October at 4 a.m.
From the end of the October UK will ease the travel restrictions for eligible passengers under their policy.
The fully vaccinated foreigners from the red list countries will be allowed.
But the new policies got totally wrong, illogical and discriminatory for Indians when it announced its list of 17 countries that will not require quarantine upon arrival to England and India was missing in the list.
India being such a big nation and biggest country in manufacturing vaccines and distributing it all around the world, this rules were totally unacceptable.
UK government stated in their policies that the Indians who have been vaccinated in India will not be considered as a fully vaccinated traveller. They will still have to be under quarantine for 10 days after arriving in England and have to undergo three rounds of testing no matter if they are fully vaccinated.
Indians are slamming UK government for such as discriminatory decision of excluding India from their list of nations and ignoring Covishield which has been approved by WHO itself. The only approved vaccines by UK government are: Oxford/AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Janssen.
And for the matter of fact ‘covishield’ is the same form of vaccine ‘AstraZeneca’ the only difference is that Covishield is manufactured in serum institute of India and AstraZeneca is manufactured in Oxford University and British-Swedish pharma still UK is being naive and disregarding India’s Covishield.