Haridwar, June 23: Ayurvedic products giant Patanjali on Tuesday launched a new drug, Coronil which, the company claimed, is an evidence-based medicine for treatment of Covid-19, a pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. Swami Ramdev, the yoga guru, unveiled the medicine at a press conference at Patanjali’s headquarters in Haridwar, Uttarakhand.
Patanjali CEO Acharya Balkrishna had earlier this month claimed that a team of scientists had been working to develop a medicinal compound that could treat Covid-19. He claimed 100 per cent favourable results in trials.
Patanjali has said the research was undertaken by a joint team of the Patanjali Research Institute (PRI) and the National Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS), Jaipur. The product has been manufactured by Divya Pharmacy of the Patanajli.
Launching the medicine, Ramdev said, “The whole world has been waiting for someone to develop a medicine for coronavirus. Today, we are proud that we developed the first ayurvedic medicine for coronavirus. It has been named Coronil.”
“We conducted clinical study on 100 patients. Around 65 per cent of them returned negative test results within three days,” Ramdev said.
He said, “Hundred per cent patients got cured in seven days. We have prepared this medicine with adequate research. Our medicine has 100 per cent recovery rate and zero per cent death rate.”
Ramdev claimed that Patanjali has followed “all scientific rules” in developing this ayurvedic medicine to treat Covid-19 patients.
The launch of an ayurvedic drug for Covid-19 by Patanjali has come at a time when more than 100 candidate-vaccines are various stages of development across the world. Some of the vaccines are in advanced stages of human trials.
The front-runners in the race for developing a Covid-19 vaccine are AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Sanofi, BioNtech, and China’s CanSino Biologics.
Pending development of a vaccine, countries have allowed different combination of drugs earlier used to treat diseases such as Ebola, HIV-AIDS and previous coronavirus outbreak.
In India, some states have approved the use of homeopathy medicine Arsenic Album 30 by the general public as a prophylactic drug. It is treated as an immunity booster against Covid-19.
In Maharashtra, the worst-affected state, the government set up a task force to advise it on available traditional medicines. The task force prepared a list of ayurvedic and other traditional medicines as measures against Covid-19.
