The Supreme Court today dismissed the plea by a Doctors’ Association seeking direction for Centre to make a representation before China to seek full disclosure on COVID-19 to develop an antidote.
Doctors’ organization, Doctors For You urged the Court to direct the Government of India to make a representation to China and seek information on COVID-19 to facilitate the development of an effective antidote for the same.
The Bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan, Sanjay Kishan Kaul, and MR Shah dismissed the plea as such.
The plea, however, was sought to be withdrawn by the petitioner today when the matter came up for hearing and allowing the same, the Court dismissed the plea as withdrawn.
“Learned counsel for the petitioner seeks leave to withdraw the writ petition. Leave to withdraw the writ petition is granted. The writ petition is dismissed as withdrawn,” the Court said in its order.
The petition was drawn by Advocates Simar Suri, Aditya Giri, Dipika Jain, and Shivani Dewalla. Senior Advocate Rupinder Singh Suri settled this petition while it was filed through Advocate Abhishek Singh
PIL stated that the government of India needs to make a representation to China and call upon this neighbouring nation to share the epidemiology, evolution, clinical data and full data on COVID-19 as well as the indicators and statistics.
The plea stressed that the petitioner is not for encouraging a blame-game, but for ensuring assistance to researchers to come up with an effective antidote against the virus. It added that the WHO should also be called out by the Indian Government for its delay in notifying the global community of the severity of COVID-19 and declaring it as a pandemic, while urging for a probe to be conducted.
Read the Order here:
