With the country’s COVID graph surging past the 4.5 lakh mark and nearly 15,000 people succumbing to the disease, any claim of a “100 per cent cure” is bound to generate hope. But in such difficult times, it’s also important to regulate and guard against the propagation of a false sense of security. The Ministry of AYUSH has, therefore, done well to ask Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurved to stop advertising that it has found a cure for the contagion, until it examines the matter.
As a report in this paper has brought to light, the company did not follow due processes before launching the “Corona Kit”, which it advertised as a panacea for COVID-19. The Uttarakhand government has said its licensing authority did not grant approval to the Haridwar-based Divya Pharmacy, Patanjali’s medicine unit, to manufacture the “Corona Kit”. And, the Rajasthan government has disclaimed any knowledge of clinical trials of the drug at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Jaipur. The litany of Patanjali’s unethical practices doesn’t end here. When mildly symptomatic patients developed fever during the trials, they were administered allopathic medicines.
This is not to undermine the role of Ayurvedic remedies for people’s health and well-being, especially during the pandemic. Some herbs are known to be immunity boosters. In fact, Patanjali, reportedly, sought regulatory approval for individual medicines, that it later included in the “Corona Kit”, as “immunity boosters” and as remedies for “cough and breathlessness”. In claiming that these medicines cure COVID, Ramdev’s company is guilty of flouting medical — and business — ethics, while also discrediting Ayurveda.
