Stop advertising claims of 'Ayurvedic COVID-19 medicine' until verification, Ayush ministry tells Ramdev's Patanjali Ayurveda

Hours after Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurveda claimed that they have a “ayurvedic COVID-19 medicine”, the Centre issued a statement demanding details of the said medicine. Patanjali Ayurveda Ltd launched the product on Tuesday. In a statement, the Ministry of AYUSH instructed Patanjali to refrain from advertising or publicising such claims until they were examined. “Ministry of AYUSH has taken cognizance of the news being recently flashed in the media about Ayurvedic medicines developed for treatment of COVID-19 by Patanjali Ayurved. Facts of the claim and details of the stated scientific study are not known to the Ministry,” the statement said. A tweet by Patanjali was also deleted by Twitter after Alt News co-founder Sumaiya Shaikh flagged it as “medical misinformation” and referred to the Centre’s direction regarding advertising.

Earlier on Tuesday, Patanjali founder Ramdev said that the medicines, ‘Coronil and Swasari’, “were developed based on research and trials on 280 patients across the country,” NDTV reported. The Ayush ministry demanded “at the earliest”, details of the name and composition of the medicines being claimed for COVID treatment, “site(s)/hospital(s), where the research study was conducted for COVID-19, the protocol, sample size, Institutional Ethics Committee clearance, CTRI registration and results data of the study(ies).” During the launch, Ramdev said, “The whole country and the world was waiting for medicine or vaccine for corona. We are proud to announce that the first Ayurvedic, clinically controlled trial-based evidence and research-based medicine has been prepared by the combined efforts of Patanjali Research Centre and NIMS.” “We are launching COVID-19 medicines Coronil and Swasari today. We conducted two trials of these, first clinical controlled study, which took place in Delhi, Ahmedabad, among many other cities. Under this 280 patients were included and 100 per cent of those recovered. We were able to control Corona and its complications in this. After this the all-important clinical control trial was conducted,” he claimed. The company also said that it had collaborated with National Institute of Medical Sciences or NIMS University, Jaipur. “With the help of NIMS, Jaipur we conducted the clinical control study on 95 patients. The biggest thing which came out of this is that within three days 69 per cent patients recovered and became negative from positive (cases) and within seven days 100 per cent of them became negative,” said Ramdev. With inputs from agencies