Tue 02 June 2021:
Thousands of doctors across India are putting on black armbands and calling for the arrest of a hugely popular guru who has claimed yoga can prevent COVID-19 and that conventional medicine has killed thousands of coronavirus patients.
Baba Ramdev, the creator of a successful traditional medicine empire, said last month the pandemic showed modern pharmaceuticals to be “stupid and failed science” and claimed hundreds of thousands “have died because they had allopathy (conventional) medicines”.
Doctors also changed their social media profile pictures to black squares, Al Jazeera’s Elizabeth Puranam said, reporting from capital New Delhi.
“In a country like India where people tend to follow spiritual gurus, yoga gurus and that too blindly, when people like that, they spread mistrust, misinformation, it becomes very difficult for us as science-based people, as doctors to wipe that misinformation out,” Dr Mehak Bhushan of the Federation of Resident Doctors Association told Al Jazeera.
Ramdev, a keen supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, retracted his comments after an appeal by India’s Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and the guru said he had been merely reading out other people’s WhatsApp messages.
But he then caused a further outcry by saying that he did not need a coronavirus vaccine because he was protected by yoga and traditional medicine, or Ayurveda.
Ramdev’s company Patanjali Ayurved is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, selling everything from toothpaste to jeans at its ubiquitous stores.
Earlier this year, it launched a herbal remedy called Coronil that Ramdev, who also has a TV channel, said would cure coronavirus.
The launch event was attended by Vardhan, himself an allopathic doctor and chair of the executive board of the World Health Organization (WHO).
-Al Jazeera
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