BANGALORE – As the number of Covid-19 instances in India exceeds 3.2 million and the country enters the seventh month of mobility restrictions, small but noisy teams of covid deniers and anti-masks have emerged.
The video gained 617,000 perspectives when it was shared through Mr. Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, a social media influencer with a gift for catchy Hindi videos and an evangelical distrust of vaccines and antibiotics.
All about Mr. Chowdhury proclaims that he is a doctor: his website, his nickname on Twitter, his Facebook account, his YouTube channel with 22,100 subscribers and more than 25 books. His interview calls him “Dr. Biswaroop”.
Mr Chowdhury, however, has no medical training. He holds a PhD in diabetes from Alliance International University, Zambia, which some educational sites are an online title factory. Its main activity: camps in India, Malaysia and Vietnam to “cure diabetes” in 72 hours.
Since January, he has stated that Covid-19 is “similar to any other flu” and highly contagious. Calling it a pandemic is “propaganda to lock up the world,” he said.
A Facebook organization called “The Covid 19 Conspiracy by Dr. Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury” has 1,900 members. His most recent messages show him photographed with the Chief Minister of Delhi and the Minister of Health of India. Both politicians hold their e-book about their “cure” for Covid-19.
Chowdhury said his treatment of “0 money, 0 drugs and 0 mortality” over nutritional changes has “cured more than 80% of the 21,000 covid patients and flu-like diseases.”
Approximately 5,000 of those patients, he said, had contacted their workplace after testing positive for Covid, “for the police to quarantine and harass.
He said covid’s more than 820,000 deaths worldwide were due to world leaders inflating the numbers by counting “all flu deaths as deaths by Covid.”
In recent years, the “doctor” has denied HIV/AIDS lifestyles and claimed that he can treat cancer and diabetes by converting his diet.
In 2015, the Anti-Chatening Unit of the Delhi Medical Council warned the Indian Ministry of Health that it opposed Chowdhury’s “illegal” accusations of the cure of an “incurable disease.” Diabetes can be managed, they say, eating healthily and exercising, yet calling a cure is misleading.
Despite his dubious credibility, Chowdhury’s prospects for Covid are enthusiastic. A growing number of online posts and videos show Indians who doubt the effectiveness of masks and vaccines and refuse to stick to social estrangement patterns.
In one video, a young man who speaks Hindi burns his mask, says the pandemic is a Western conspiracy and sings “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” (Salve Mother India). Twitter called the video “spam,” but it must be viewed from Mr. Chowdhury’s account.
India’s Medical Research Council, which administers anti-Covid policies, said it is “irresponsible” not to wear a mask. Many states impose heavy fines on those who do not wear a mask in public.
K Sujatha Rao, former secretary of physical conditioning of the Indian government, said: “For an infectious disease, a vaccine, a mask, is the most resistant barrier to protect yourself and others.
Dr. Jaleel Parkar, a chest doctor who is part of the Covid Working Group in Mumbai and who recovered from Covid in June, said he had noticed the disease as a doctor, patient and spouse.
“We, the medical staff, are tired of dressing up in masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) for 8 to 10 hours a day. Yes, there are many unknowns about Covid’s remedy and immunity. But what can we do? We can’t let other people die. . We have to be guilty of what we know.”
In January, WHO stated that “the widespread use of the mask among other healthy people in the community environment is not yet supported by direct or clinical evidence”. In June, he called on governments to “encourage the general public to wear masks where transmission is widespread and where physical distance is difficult.”
Dr Anant Bhan, a physician and researcher in bioethics and global health, said: “It is WHO’s credit to update recommendations as new evidence emerges. Charlatans like Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury take advantage of this to magnify the confusion.
Chowdhury also opposes vaccines. In a video aimed at the global expectation of a Covid-19 vaccine, he discusses the use of fetal bovine serum to administer many vaccines. Using graphic photographs of unborn and bloodied calf fetuses, she alarmingly estimates that 24 billion calves would die each year from the Covid-19 vaccine.
Experts say that while some vaccines use fetal bovine serums, there is still no evidence of their use in Covid vaccines, and to the extent that Mr Chowdhury claims so.
At the end of the vaccine video, Mr. Chowdhury sings “Jai Shri Ram!”, a cry that incites Hindu fundamentalists and vigilantes who have attacked Indians who eat beef or paintings in the leather industries, in the call for the protection of cows.
Denying any political affiliation, Mr. Chowdhury said he had used the debatable song because it is “the essential”. It refers to the recent inauguration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of a Ram temple in Ayodhya on the site of a mosque demolished in 1991 by Hindu mobs.
Chowdhury also said: “Coronavirus mutates so fast that over time there is a vaccine, it will be harmful,” he said. Scientists were generating vaccines “for advertising purposes.”
Dr. Peter Thielen, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins’s Applied Physics Laboratory, who studies the pathogen’s genetic code, told the New York Times that coronavirus is mutating, but that there is only one “strain.” It’s the same virus that’s infecting other people around the world now, and a vaccine may be offering lasting protection.
“The government deserves to regulate others who spread incorrect information in a fitness crisis,” Dr. Bhan said.
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