Covid-19: IMA questions Harsh Vardhan on Ayush protocol

Days after the Central government released a Covid-19 management protocol based on Ayurveda, India’s largest body of doctors raised several posers to the Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, asking him to come clean on the protocol with scientific evidence.

“Is there satisfactory evidence regarding the claims made from studies done on Covid-19 patients? If so, whether the evidence is weak or moderate or strong? The evidence should be in the public domain and available for scientific scrutiny,” the Indian Medical Association said in a statement.

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Arguing that science demands reproducibility of a claim in non-conflict situations and outcome of double-blind control studies as the evidence of a claim, the IMA wondered whether the proponents of the claim and ministry officials would subject themselves as volunteers in such studies.

The doctors asked Vardhan to disclose how many of his ministerial colleagues have so far made the informed choice of getting treated under this protocol.

"IMA demands that the Union Health Minister should come clean on the above posers. If not, he is inflicting a fraud on the nation and gullible patients by calling placebos as drugs," IMA national president Rajan Sharma and secretary-general R V Asokan said in the statement.

The government, on its part, had stated that Ayush protocol was supplementary to the standard treatment protocol issued by the Health Ministry on the advice of the Indian Council of Medical Research.

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Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha, Secretary, the Ministry of Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH), clarified that the protocol based on the Indian system of medicine should be considered as a supplement and not a replacement to the standard protocol.

It aimed to ensure that the mild cases didn’t progress into severe ones and give support to asymptomatic Covid-19 positive patients, Kotecha said.

“This is also not meant for people having hypoxia or lack of oxygen, which is associated with a severe form of the disease.”

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The Ayush protocol was created based on empirical evidence and emerging trends from more than 66 ongoing studies registered on the Clinical Trial Registry of India, Kotecha said.

The IMA, however, countered that argument claiming that empirical evidence is nothing but anecdotal evidence, which could not be relied upon.

The row erupted on a day when India recorded 78,524 new cases continuing on its three-week-long path of declining numbers after attaining a peak on September 17. As many as 971 people died in the past 24 hours taking the toll to 1,05,526. The total number of active cases stands 9.02 lakh.