The struggle to keep India’s Covid-19 patients breathing

On May 10, 2020, we admitted the first patient with Covid19 to our hospital. We did speedily ramp up critical care, to provide oxygenated hospital beds, ICUs, medicines, and ventilators, gloves, N95 masks, PPEs, and back up supplies.  Oxygen. Perhaps for the first time we realised how important was Oxygen, the sole therapy for managing COVID-19-induced … Read the essay

Covid and Ayurveda

I criticised Patanjali Ayurveda’s claimed cure for COVID-19 for making unsubstantiated claims of efficacy. The drugs it is offering are untested and unproven. They haven’t proven their mettle in a well-conducted adequately sized randomized controlled trial. The proponents of Ayurveda, however, ask – can Ayurveda, or alternative medicine in general, be evaluated in the same … Read the essay

Ethical Challenges of Research in a Pandemic

The pressure for an effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19 is high. There are more than 2,000 studies on COVID-19 across the world; many of these are trials on humans to develop vaccines, and to test the efficacy of drugs for this new disease. The urgency of this pandemic presents new, acute ethical challenges in … Read the essay