Tuesday 2 March 2021

‘A conflict of interest mars paper on Ayurvedic Covid drug Coronil – and it should be retracted’

‘Yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his FMCG company Patanjali Ayurved have recently been in the news for advancing a supposedly Ayurvedic drug named Coronil as the “first evidence-based medicine” for COVID-19. But despite the dubiety of this claim, Coronil has been approved for sale by the Government of India on the sole basis of a scientific paper, published in the journal Phytomedicine in February 2021.

‘A previous article discussed the wobbly assertions in the paper and their mismatch with Patanjali’s conclusion that Coronil has been properly tested or that it is efficacious. But there is another bit of detail that may disqualify the paper’s publication itself. In the paper’s ‘Declaration of Competing Interest’ section, the authors say:

“Authors declare no conflict of interests with regards to the submitted work. The medications were provided by Divya Pharmacy, Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India. Acharya Balkrishna is an honorary trustee in Divya Yog Mandir Trust. Besides, providing the medications, Divya Pharmacy was not involved in any aspect of the clinical trial reported in this study. Clinical trial was conducted at National Institute of Medical Sciences, Jaipur, India.”

Read here (Science TheWire, Mar 3, 2021)

Worst ever Covid variant? Omicron

John Campbell shares his findings on Omicron.  View here (Youtube, Nov 27, 2021)