In Harsh Vardhan’s exit, a Covid admission and course correction
His departure is one of the strongest signals on the handling of the ferocious second Covid-19 wave — to the government’s detractors, it is an admission of its failure; and to its supporters, a much-needed course correction to reassure the country.
Dr. Harsh Vardhan and his wife take first dose of Covid-19 vaccine at Delhi Heart & Lung Institute in New Delhi (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)
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Of the 12 ministers who resigned ahead of the reshuffle, the one that caught the eye was the exit of Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan.
His departure is one of the strongest signals on the handling of the ferocious second Covid-19 wave — to the government’s detractors, it is an admission of its failure; and to its supporters, a much-needed course correction to reassure the country.
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On March 7, Harsh Vardhan announced that it was the “endgame” of the pandemic in India. But cases started to mount in the last week of March and in the run-up to the April crisis over supply of medical oxygen, his role as Health Minister had diminished.
The Prime Minister’s Office, top officials of NITI Aayog, and the empowered groups on Covid-19 took charge of the controls to deal with the situation.
Consider this:
* On March 17, the Prime Minister held a crucial interaction with Chief Ministers in the backdrop of the surge in cases in various states. At that meeting, according to the PMO statement, it was the Home Minister who listed the districts on which the Chief Ministers were asked to focus to contain the spread of the virus; Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan was the one who made the presentation on the surge in Covid cases.
* On April 8, Modi again had an interaction with the CMs on the Covid situation. At this meeting too, the Health Secretary, according to the PMO statement, made a presentation.
* On April 23, the PM chaired a meeting with 11 surge states; and in that meeting, the country’s Covid task force head and NITI Aayog member Dr V K Paul made a presentation.
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President Ram Nath Kovind along with the newly appointed Council of Ministers in the Narendra Modi government.(Twitter/narendramodi)
* Modi held multiple meetings in April with key Central government officials, but Harsh Vardhan was missing. On April 4 and April 27, the PM reviewed the pandemic situation at a meeting attended by top officials including the Principal Secretary to PM and the Cabinet Secretary; on April 30, Modi chaired a meeting to review the functioning of different empowered groups. Similarly, he held meetings on April 16, April 22 and April 23 on augmenting medical oxygen availability; at these meetings too, top officials and oxygen manufacturers participated.
Harsh Vardhan, on his part, continued to defend the government by targeting political opponents who criticised the handling of the pandemic.
Attacking Opposition-ruled states, he asked them to take appropriate measures and apply the lessons that the nation had learned the past year from its handling of the pandemic.
On April 7, amid demands from some states to open up vaccination to all above the age 18, the Health Minister slammed the surge states, saying they were trying to “distract attention from their failures and spread panic among the people”. He made these remarks on the eve of a meeting of the Prime Minister with the Chief Ministers.
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On April 19, Harsh Vardhan wrote a strong letter to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, accusing Congress leaders and party-ruled states of “spreading falsehoods” and “fuelling vaccine hesitancy… playing with the lives of our countrymen”.
He claimed that “irresponsible public pronouncements” by some Congress leaders had resulted in a “below national average vaccination coverage of senior citizens and even front-line workers in some of the Congress-ruled states” and “it is these very same states that have also become the big contributors in the second wave”.
Much before the second wave, the Indian Medical Association, the country’s largest medical body, had criticised Harsh Vardhan for sharing a stage with Ramdev.
On February 23, Dr J A Jayalal, IMA national president, said Harsh Vardhan should come out with a statement that he was not endorsing the sale of Coronil, a commercial product that Patanjali claimed had received certification from the Ayush Ministry, as a medicine supporting Covid-19 treatment.
Kaunain Sheriff M is an award-winning investigative journalist and the National Health Editor at The Indian Express. He is the author of Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, an investigation into one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies.
With over a decade of experience, Kaunain brings deep expertise in three areas of investigative journalism: law, health, and data. He currently leads The Indian Express newsroom’s in-depth coverage of health.
His work has earned some of the most prestigious honours in journalism, including the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, and the Mumbai Press Club’s Red Ink Award.
Kaunain has also collaborated on major global investigations. He was part of the Implant Files project with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which exposed malpractices in the medical device industry across the world. He also contributed to an international investigation that uncovered how a Chinese big-data firm was monitoring thousands of prominent Indian individuals and institutions in real time.
Over the years, he has reported on several high-profile criminal trials, including the Hashimpura massacre, the 2G spectrum scam, and the coal block allocation case. Within The Indian Express, he has been honoured three times with the Indian Express Excellence Award for his investigations—on the anti-Sikh riots, the Vyapam exam scam, and the abuse of the National Security Act in Uttar Pradesh. ... Read More
