The National Security Advisor Ajit Doval’s call with his US counterpart, Jake Sullivan resulted in quickly waking up the Biden administration to lift the embargo on export of raw materials for making Covid vaccinations to India. The US administration under Biden had only few day’s ago officially reiterated its stand on banning export of raw materials to make Covid vaccines to India following its “vaccine nationalism” policy although it is sitting on over several times excess stock pile of Covid vaccine needed for its entire population.

The Biden administration from January this year employed a wartime law, Defence Production Act (DPA) to throttle supplies of raw materials like bags, filters, vials, glass, cell culture media, plastic tubings, stoppers and some reagents. This directly impacted Indian vaccine makers like Serum Institute of India (SII) to produce Novavax Covid vaccines as also further increase the production of Covishield and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin.

The biden administration put this embargo in place to favour its domestic Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Jhonson & Jhonson’s unit Janssen.

Ajit Doval seems to have told firmly his US counterpart that India too might be forced to retaliate with curbing export of critical and rare ingredient supplied by an Indian pharmaceutical company in Bombay required to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines made by US based Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Ajit Doval would have firmly told Jake Sullivan, curbing and counter curbing of vaccine is counter productive and would only lead to endangering people at large being deprived of inoculation from the deadly virus.

Ajit Doval seems to have put his foot down by conveying that the Modi government takes serious note of the self-centred attitude of the US in denying vaccine raw material to India for guarding its commercial interests in the face of pandemic tragedy.

India also reminded US of standing by it and exporting 35.82 lakh tablets of hydroxychloroquine along with nine metric tons of active pharmaceutical ingredient or API required in the manufacturing of the drug on the request of President Donald Trump in the beginning of the pandemic last year.

The Democratic regime led by Biden would have realised that its behaviour of churlishly denying raw material for vaccines at the time of humanitarian crisis when India is reeling under a virulent second wave of Covid-19 not only made them look very petty in the world community but would also incur huge commercial loss to the US pharma companies it wishes to protect.

So, PM Modi very effectively got the US to literally eat its own words in a no-nonsense manner through his time tested legendary National Advisor, Ajit Doval. This is new age diplomacy of resurgent Bharat, which holds its ground effectively even in the face of a national emergency.

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