Keeping Pakistan on red list: Dr Faisal exposes UK claims about science, data

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan government has responded to the UK government’s reasons for keeping the former on its travel red list in a detailed letter written by Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Health Dr Faisal Sultan.

The letter was shared Wednesday by Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari on Twitter, saying that the table in Dr Sultan’s letter "exposes" claims of the UK government that its decision was based on science and data.

"UK’s Conservative govt with a strong Indophiles’ presence playing discriminatory politics against Pakistan on COVID. The UK statement to which Dr Faisal has responded exposing its claims!" wrote Mazari.

Dr Sultan’s detailed letter starts of by pointing out that UK’s decision to retain Pakistan on its red list and move other regional countries to its amber list has been received “with dismay” in Pakistan. He clarified that Pakistan has “no interest in allowing” its nationals who pose a health risk to other societies to travel abroad. He said this is a shared global objective.

The SAPM on health highlighted UK’s explanation on why Pakistan is still on the red list and addressed it with support from data on Pakistan’s COVID-19 response, testing rates, genomic surveillance and all other efforts being taken by the Pakistan government to tackle the pandemic and stabilise the spread of the virus.

The UK, in a statement to the Pakistan government sent on August 6, had said that “a combination of deteriorating epidemiological situation, combined with low testing rates and limited genomic surveillance presents a high risk that an outbreak of a new variant, or existing variant of concern will not be identified”.

On the “deteriorating epidemiological situation”, Dr Sultan presented a table comparing key indicators from Pakistan and some other countries in the region which currently sit on the amber list to illustrate what he referred to as “obvious disparities”. He said that when looking at counties track record of managing the epidemic, “numbers alone, without context, can be deceptive”.

According to the table’s data, while an uptick was seen in Pakistan’s numbers in the last few weeks, Pakistan, at the time of addition into the red list had very low numbers as compared to the numbers from other countries on the amber list.