Herd immunity, homeopathy - not lockdown - best to fight coronavirus: Rajiv Bajaj

Bajaj Auto MD Rajiv Bajaj said putting the country under lockdown is hindering herd immunity, which is the only protection against coronavirus till a vaccine is developed.

Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director of Bajaj Auto, suggested that homeopathy can be a ray of hope in increasing immunity to help people overcome the novel coronavirus pandemic. Talking to India Today, Bajaj expressed his concerned over rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths, adding that developing herd immunity is one of the ways to fight the contagion.

Bajaj said although he is not an epidemiologist but to his knowledge herd immunity can be developed by either administering vaccines, or developing immunity naturally. Since a vaccine is at least one year in future, Bajaj said the population will have to develop resistance against coronavirus in a natural way. Locking down everybody and everything completely is not the way to develop resistance, as there is no chance of developing herd immunity, he implied.

Bajaj also claimed that no country in the world could arrest a flu virus and this is why 600,000 people die every year due to common flu. If the common flu virus could not be arrested even after so many decades of research, then how can COVID-19 be contained by lock down, he said, further adding that lock down is not the solution to this crisis.

Bajaj further said that homeopathy has been documented to be quite effective in pandemics similar to coronavirus. Be it the 1918 Spanish Flu or the recent Cuban epidemic, the doctors who treated their patients with homeopathy lost a fraction of patients as compared to those who were treated with allopathic medicine, he said.

Rajiv Bajaj had put his claims of homeopathy's immunity boosting properties to test 10 years ago during the Swine Flu menace. His company had administered a homeopathy medicine to all of its employees and others. According to Bajaj, not one person out of the 50,000, who were given the homeopathic medicine, contracted swine flu, even though Pune was the epicentre of the epidemic in India.

Further elaborating his stand, Bajaj said the good thing is that India has a separate ministry called Aayush, which is promoting homeopathy like other therapies, showing that it is a form of medicine and not poison or toxin. Bajaj argued that even the strongest critics also accept that homeopathy will do no harm as it does not have any side effects.

Talking about positive case studies, Bajaj said that Dr Rajan Sankaran from Mumbai in the last 6 weeks got access to many COVID-19 patients in countries like Iran, Nepal, Romania, Bolivia, Italy, France and Netherlands and treated them successfully. This gives hope that Camphor 1M can be effective in treating COVID-19 patients as well as increasing immunity in others who might get infected, says Bajaj.

As a part of corporate social responsibility, Bajaj Auto has set up a homeopathy centre in Pune called Prana, which has distributed 67,000 vials of Camphor 1M. Each vial is enough for family of 4-5 people. Not only has Bajaj distributed this medicine among his employees and close friends, but police forces in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad police have also accepted and administered their staff with this purported remedial homeopathy medicine. There are around 15,000 police personnel in Pune who are taking this medicine, says Bajaj. Police Commissioner of Pune city told India Today that he has allowed police officials to take this medicine, and surprisingly no police personnel in his jurisdiction has been affected with coronavirus.

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