[The country’s top science agency tailored its findings to fit Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s optimistic narrative despite a looming crisis, researchers say.]
In September 2020, eight months
before a deadly Covid-19 second wave struck
India, government-appointed scientists downplayed the possibility of a new
outbreak. Previous infections and early lockdown efforts had tamed the spread,
the scientists wrote in a study that was widely covered by the Indian
news media after it was released last year.
The results dovetailed neatly with
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two main goals: restart India’s stricken economy
and kick off campaigning for his party in state
elections that coming spring. But Anup Agarwal, a physician then
working for India’s top science agency, which reviewed and published the study,
worried that its conclusions would lull the country into a false sense of
security.
Dr. Agarwal took his concerns to
the agency’s top official in October. The response: He and another concerned
scientist were reprimanded, he said.
In the wake of the devastating
second wave, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, many in India are
asking how Mr. Modi’s government missed the warning signs. Part of the answer,
according to current and former government researchers and documents reviewed
by The New York Times, is that senior officials forced scientists at elite
institutions to downplay the threat to prioritize Mr. Modi’s political goals.
“Science is being used as a
political weapon to forward the government narrative rather than help people,”
said Dr. Agarwal, 32.
Senior officials at Dr. Agarwal’s
agency — called the Indian Council of Medical Research, or I.C.M.R. —
suppressed data showing the risks, according to the researchers and documents.
They pressured scientists to withdraw another study that called the
government’s efforts into question, the researchers said, and distanced the
agency from a third study that foresaw a second wave.
Agency scientists interviewed by
The Times described a culture of silence. Midlevel researchers worried that
they would be passed over for promotions and other opportunities if they
questioned superiors, they said.
“Science thrives in an environment
where you can openly question evidence and discuss it dispassionately and
objectively,” said Shahid Jameel, one of India’s top virologists and a former
government adviser, who has been critical of the agency.
“That, sadly, at so many levels,
has been missing,” he said.
The science agency declined to
answer detailed questions. In a statement, it said it was a “premier research
organization” that had helped to expand India’s testing capacity. India’s health ministry, which oversees
the agency, did not respond to requests for comment.
India is hardly the first country
where virus science has become politicized. The United States remains far
short of taming the disease as politicians and anti-vaccine
activists, fueled by disinformation and credulous
media, challenge the scientific consensus on vaccines and wearing masks.
The Chinese government has tried to obscure
the outbreak’s origin, while vaccine skeptics have won audiences from Russia to Spain to Tanzania.
India, a vast country with an
underfunded health care system, would have struggled to contain the second wave
no matter what. A more
contagious new variant fueled the spread. People had stopped wearing
masks and socially distancing.
“Prime Minister Modi has never,
ever said to lower the guard,” said Vijay Chauthaiwale, a member of Mr. Modi’s
governing Bharatiya Janata Party.
Still, the government contributed
to complacency. Mr. Modi boasted in
January, just months before the devastating second wave hit, that India had “saved
humanity from a big disaster.” Harsh Vardhan, then the health minister, said in
March that the country was “in
the endgame of Covid-19.” (Amid criticism over the government’s
response, Dr. Vardhan stepped
down in July.)
The I.C.M.R., which conducts and
reviews research for the government, played a major role in shaping
perceptions. India has not released granular data on the virus’s spread,
hampering the ability of scientists to study it. In that vacuum, the agency
offered projections that often steered debate.
Politics began to influence the
agency’s approach early last year, according to scientists familiar with its
deliberations.
In April 2020, in the midst of a
nationwide lockdown ordered by Mr. Modi, the government blamed an early
outbreak on
an Islamic gathering, spurring attacks against
Muslims by some Hindu nationalists, who provide the core of the prime minister’s
support.
Amid that anger, some officials
within the science agency said the gathering had undermined containment
efforts. The gathering “has undone the benefits of lockdown,” said one
news outlet, citing an agency source. Raman Gangakhedkar, then its chief
scientist, in an interview singled out the gathering as an
“unexpected surprise.”
In an interview with The Times, Dr.
Gangakhedkar said that he had expressed “anguish” over the government’s
statements targeting Muslims but said the science agency’s director general,
Balram Bhargava, told him that the matter should not concern him. Dr. Bhargava
did not respond to requests for comment.
The lockdown did severe economic
damage. Once it ebbed, Mr. Modi moved to rekindle the economy and start
election campaigning — and government scientists, researchers within the agency
said, helped pave the way.
In June 2020, a study commissioned by the agency concluded that Mr. Modi’s
lockdown had slowed but would not stop the virus’s spread. Within days, the
authors withdrew it. The agency, saying the study’s modeling had not been
peer-reviewed, wrote in a tweet that it “does not reflect the official position
of I.C.M.R.”
One of the study’s authors, along
with a scientist familiar with it, said the authors had withdrawn it amid
pressure from the agency’s leaders, who questioned its findings and complained
that it had been published before they had reviewed it. The move was unusual,
the scientists said, adding that the agency’s leadership would typically adjust
problematic language rather than demand a paper be withdrawn.
In July 2020, Dr. Bhargava issued
two directives to agency scientists that his internal critics saw as politically
motivated.
The first called on scientists at a
number of institutions to help approve, in just six weeks, a coronavirus
vaccine developed by Indian scientists. In a memo dated July 2 and reviewed by
The Times, Dr. Bhargava said the agency aimed to approve the vaccine by Aug.
15, India’s Independence Day, an event at which Mr. Modi frequently urges the
country toward greater self-reliance. “Kindly note that noncompliance will be
viewed very seriously,” the directive read.
The request alarmed agency
scientists. Regulators in other countries were still months away from approving
their own vaccines. The agency’s top leaders backed off once the
timetable became public. (The vaccine was approved by the Indian
authorities months later, in January.)
Dr. Bhargava’s second directive,
issued in late July 2020, forced scientists to withhold data that suggested the
virus was still spreading in 10 cities, according to emails and scientists
familiar with the work.
The data came from the
agency’s serological studies, which tracked the disease based on
antibodies in blood samples. The data showed high infection rates in some neighborhoods, including
in Delhi and Mumbai, despite containment efforts. In a July 25 email reviewed
by The Times, Dr. Bhargava told the scientists that “I have not got approval”
to publish the data.
“You are sitting in an ivory tower
and not understanding the sensitivity,” Dr. Bhargava wrote. “I am sincerely
disappointed.”
Naman Shah, a physician who worked
on the studies, said withholding the data worked against science and democracy.
“This is a government which clearly
has a philosophy and history of trying to assert power by capturing every
institution and making it an arena for political struggle,” he said.
The data that I.C.M.R. did release
helped officials argue incorrectly, to the country and the world, that the
coronavirus wasn’t spreading in India as virulently as in the United States, Brazil, Britain and France.
Then, last autumn, an
agency-approved study wrongly suggested that the worst was over.
Known as the Supermodel in India,
the study projected that the pandemic would ebb in India by mid-February. It
cited Mr. Modi’s lockdown earlier in 2020. It said that the country may
have reached herd immunity because more than 350 million
people had already been infected or developed antibodies. The science agency
fast-tracked the study’s approval, said Dr. Agarwal and other people familiar
with its progress.
Scientists inside and outside the
agency picked the study apart. Other countries were nowhere close
to herd immunity. Plenty of people in India still hadn’t been infected. None of
the study’s authors were epidemiologists. Its model appeared to have been
designed to fit the conclusion, some scientists said.
“They had parameters which can’t be
measured and whenever the curve was not matching, they changed that parameter,”
said Somdatta Sinha, a retired scientist who studies infectious disease models
and who wrote a rebuttal. “I mean, we don’t do modeling like that. This is
misguiding people.”
Dr. Agarwal, the agency physician,
said he took his concerns in October to Dr. Bhargava, who told him it was “none
of his business.” Dr. Bhargava, he said, then summoned another scientist who
had raised concerns about the study with Dr. Agarwal and reprimanded them both.
M. Vidyasagar, chairman of the
committee that produced the Supermodel, declined to comment. Indian science
officials said in May, as the second wave tore through the
country, that the panel’s mathematical model “can only predict future with some
certainty so long as virus dynamics and its transmissibility don’t change
substantially over time.”
One study,
published in January 2021, did predict a second wave. Published in the journal
Nature, it said that such an outbreak could strike if restrictions were “lifted
without any other mitigations in place” and called for more testing. One of its
authors worked for the I.C.M.R., but its leadership pressured him to remove his
affiliation with the agency from the paper, said people familiar with the
matter.
The second wave struck in April.
With hospitals overwhelmed, Indian health officials recommended treatments that
the government’s own scientists had found to be ineffective.
One was blood plasma. Dr. Agarwal
and his colleagues had concluded months before that blood plasma did not help
Covid-19 patients, a finding that echoed others.
The agency dropped the recommendation in May.
The government still recommends a second treatment, the Indian-made malaria
drug hydroxychloroquine, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that it is ineffective. Desperate families
scrambled to find both during the second wave, creating black
markets where prices soared.
Current and former agency
scientists said they didn’t speak out because they considered the treatments
politically protected. Mr. Modi’s party had organized plasma donation camps last year to mark his 70th
birthday. The Indian government also used hydroxychloroquine as a diplomatic
tool, winning points with Donald
J. Trump, then the American president, and Jair M. Bolsonaro, the Brazilian leader, who both pressured
New Delhi last year to lift its export limits on the drug.
“If you want to work somewhere for
the rest of your life, you want a good relationship with people,” Dr. Agarwal
said. “You just be nonconfrontational about everything.”
Dr. Agarwal resigned in October and
later worked in Gallup, N.M. Now a physician in Baltimore, he said his
experience with the agency had driven him to leave India.
“You start questioning your work,
you know,” he said. “And then, you get disillusioned by it.”