The UK government has amended its foreign travel guidance to clarify that the Indian-made version of the AstraZeneca vaccine is an approved jab.
But it is not clear whether people from India can travel to the UK without having to self-isolate for 10 days.
The UK’s refusal to recognise Covishield had triggered a firestorm of protests in India.
The UK had in its travel rules said that Indian travellers who received both doses of the Covishield vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India will be considered unvaccinated and will have to undergo self-isolation for 10 days. Reacting to the development, external affairs minister S Jaishankar strongly took up the issue of Covishield-vaccinated travellers being required to quarantine in the UK with newly-appointed British foreign secretary Elizabeth Truss at a meeting in New York.
At a media briefing on Tuesday, foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla had also called the UK’s travel rules ‘discriminatory’ and said that India is well within its rights to initiate reciprocal measures if the UK does not address the concerns.
With more than 721 million doses administered so far, Covishield is India’s primary vaccine.
On Tuesday, India described the rule as “discriminatory” and asked the UK to stop requiring fully-vaccinated Indians to self-isolate on arrival.
In its new travel advisory, the UK said that a traveller will be considered fully vaccinated if they are inoculated with a full dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Janssen vaccines from a relevant public health body in select countries.
The United Kingdom revised its travel advisory on Wednesday in which it said that Covishield, the coronavirus disease vaccine jointly developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII) – will qualify as an approved vaccine for travellers visiting Britain from any part of the world from October 4 onwards. However, Indians vaccinated with both doses of Covishield will still need to quarantine in the UK due to an issue over ‘vaccine certification’, even though the country has been added to the ‘amber list’ according to the latest travel rules.
