Yoga guru Baba Ramdev has once again angered the healthcare community with his comments on COVID. While previously, he peddled Patanjali's herbal concoction Coronil to be a "100 percent cure" without any scientific basis. Now, he has offended allopathic doctors across India with unscientific claims, mockery, and insensitivity while downplaying the severity of the pandemic.
The controversy surrounding Baba Ramdev’s statements started amid the breakdown of health infrastructure and oxygen shortages due to the virus, which has claimed over three lakh lives. One of his videos surfaced online on 21 May, where he is seen blaming COVID patients for not “breathing properly". In the video, he can be heard saying:
“God has given us free oxygen, why don’t we breathe that? How can there be a shortage when God has filled the atmosphere with oxygen? Fools are looking for oxygen cylinders. Just breathe the free oxygen. Why are you complaining about shortage of oxygen and beds and crematoriums?”Baba Ramdev
While families of patients and doctors condemned him for his insensitivity, a couple of weeks later another video emerged where he's seen blaming allopathic doctors for not being able to come up with a cure for COVID, and blaming them for the deaths in the country.
While he was forced to withdraw his comments, as both the Indian Medical Association and the health ministry pulled him up for it, the damage has already been done.
On 26 May, the Uttarakhand IMA sent a Rs 1,000 crore defamation notice to him, stating that if he doesn’t post a video countering the statements given by him and tender a written apology within the next 15 days, then a sum of Rs 1,000 crore will be demanded from him.
For today’s episode, we will analyse the claims that Baba Ramdev has made in the past and how the Centre has been dealing with this problem of rumour-mongering during this pandemic? You will also hear from allopathic doctors about what they think about Ramdev’s claims.
For this episode, we spoke to Dr Abhishek Tandon, a Senior Resident Academic at AIIMS Jodhpur, Dr Harjit Singh Batti, the former president of AIIMS Resident Doctors’ Association, Dr Suvrankar Dutta, a radiology resident at AIIMS Delhi and Dr Faiz Abbas Abidi, a junior doctor in Lucknow.
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