Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh on Thursday warned yoga guru Ramdev that the state government will not allow the sale of his Ayurvedic medicines, which he had claimed had shown favourable results against the coronavirus.
“The National Institute of Medical Sciences, Jaipur, will find out whether clinical trials of Patanjali Ayurved’s ‘coronil’ were done at all,” Deshmukh tweeted. “An abundant warning to Ramdev that Maharashtra won’t allow sale of spurious medicines.”
On Tuesday, the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, or AYUSH, had ordered the company to stop advertising its preparation as a cure for the coronavirus. The ministry sought details of the composition of the medicines, the results of its research, the hospitals where the research was conducted, whether the company had a clearance from the Institutional Ethics Committee and whether it had registered for the clinical trials.
A day later, Deshmukh had welcomed the Centre’s move to ban the advertisement of Patanjali Ayurved’s medicines. “Claims of a cure for corona without sharing clinical trials, sample size details, registration with authorities can’t be acceptable,” he had tweeted. “It’s great that AYUSH banned such advertisement. There can be no compromise with public health and well-being at all!”
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Ramdev is selling unverified concoctions as Covid-19 cure. Yet, authorities seem reluctant to act
Ramdev has claimed that his company took all the required permissions from the production stage to its clinical trials. However, the licence officer of Uttarakhand Ayurved department claimed that Patanjali never disclosed that its new medicine kit was for coronavirus when it applied for a license. The officer said the herbal products company sought a license for an “immunity booster and a cough and fever cure”.
The Uttarakhand government will serve a notice to Ramdev’s company for advertising its preparations as a cure for the coronavirus. Meanwhile, in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district, a petitioner has moved a court calling for a first information report against Ramdev and his company’s Chief Executive Officer Acharya Balkrishna. The plea said that the two had allegedly put the lives of people at risk by claiming to have come up with a cure for Covid-19. The case will be heard on June 30.
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