Doctors vs Ramdev: Need science, not superstition to fight Covid

June 14, 2021 2367

Yoga guru and businessman Baba Ramdev has changed his yogic pose. Weeks after scornfully declaring that allopathy calls itself a `super science’ but is actually a ‘stupid science’ and announcing that “lakhs of people have died after taking allopathic medicines,” the Baba now describes doctors as ‘god’s messengers’ and says that he himself intends to take the Covid vaccine. Earlier, Ramdev’s bizarre anti-allopathy public tirade had led to a shocked Indian Medical Association filing police and legal complaints. Justifiably so. A person of enormous influence railing against doctors and allopathic medicine in a pandemic can be dangerous. At this time, `anti-science’ babagiri should take a back seat to modern science.

It is modern medicine which is today saving millions, and it is scientists and doctors who have discovered, in a dramatically compressed time span, the only proven protection against coronavirus, namely the Covid vaccine. In a stunning achievement for science, the vaccine has been developed in less than a year. It is science which is enabling us to understand whatever little we know of SARS CoV-2 and its variants. Yes, allopathy (like democracy) may be an imperfect system, but in a health crisis it gives human beings the best fighting chance.

Health minister Dr Harshvardhan’s criticism of Ramdev’s anti-doctor remarks — the minister used the anodyne words “unfortunate and inappropriate” — were surprisingly mild. The minister should have spoken up much more strongly in defence of India’s doctors, many of whom have sacrificed their own lives to treat Covid patients. But then Ramdev was once a key member of the India Against Corruption alliance which brought down the UPA and he’s part of the wider saffron establishment. Ramdev has launched his own Covid cure, the “Coronil kit”, even though the WHO has stated it had not certified any traditional cures for Covid, and Harshvardhan attended Ramdev’s Coronil press conference.