A pandemic is fought in the ICU, but it is defined in the public square. As the Covid-19 crisis deepened, I realized that my duties as Medical Superintendent extended beyond the walls of Kasturba Hospital. The virus was spreading biologically, but misinformation was spreading digitally, and the latter was proving equally lethal.
I stepped into the digital arena—Twitter (now X), Facebook, and national media—not to seek fame, but to act as a counterweight to the “infodemic.” This narrative explores how I used satire, collaboration, and public advocacy to defend scientific integrity when the official channels failed.
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When Prose Fails, Poetry Speaks
By mid-2020, the discourse around Covid treatments had become toxic. Pharmaceutical companies were pushing drugs like Favipiravir and Itolizumab with aggressive marketing campaigns that bypassed scientific scrutiny. The regulatory bodies seemed asleep at the wheel.
I found that citing “p-values” and “confidence intervals” did not resonate with a frightened public. So, I turned to irony. I began writing poems on Twitter, adopting the persona of the drugs themselves.
In my verse about Favipiravir, I mocked its high cost and low efficacy, highlighting how it drained the pockets of the poor while offering almost no clinical benefit.
In my poem on Hydroxychloroquine, I wrote from the drug’s perspective, pleading: “Test me in a proper RCT / Before you sing my praise.”
These tweets went viral. They did what a hundred academic lectures could not: they made people pause and question the narrative. I used humor to puncture the balloon of hype. It was a risky strategy for an academic, but it was necessary. I believe that when authority becomes irrational, satire becomes a duty.
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Alliances of the Mind: The Coalition of Reason
The pandemic created unlikely comrades. I found myself part of a loose but fierce coalition of journalists, activists, and scientists who were determined to hold the system accountable.
I collaborated deeply with Dinesh S. Thakur, the public health activist. Together, we wrote a reasoned challenge to the approval of unproven antivirals in The Hindu, bridging the gap between regulatory failure and public interest.
I found a kindred spirit in Dr. C.S. Pramesh, Director of Tata Memorial Hospital. Our late-night discussions on the absurdity of testing protocols and treatment guidelines evolved into formal academic resistance. We co-authored articles in The Lancet and Nature Medicine on “Choosing Wisely,” arguing that resources should be conserved for interventions that actually work.
I also worked closely with courageous journalists like Priyanka Pulla, Rema Nagarajan, Banjot Kaur, and Malini Aisola. These reporters were doing the job that medical regulators should have done—scrutinizing data and exposing conflicts of interest. By providing them with clinical context and on-the-ground reality from Sevagram, I helped ensure their stories had medical weight. We were fighting for the patient’s right to truth.
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The Rural Disconnect and Financial Toxicity
A major theme of my public writing was the disconnect between New Delhi policy and rural reality. In my blog and articles (“Covid and Rural India”, June 14, 2021), I highlighted how lockdown rules and digital vaccination portals excluded the villagers of Wardha.
I coined the term “Financial Toxicity” to describe the side effects of the pandemic response. It wasn’t just the virus killing people; it was the cost of the cure. In my podcast with The Times of India and interviews with Deccan Herald, I argued that prescribing an ineffective drug like Remdesivir was not just a medical error—it was an economic crime against a family living on daily wages.
I spoke about how the obsession with RTPCR testing often delayed urgent surgeries for non-Covid patients, causing preventable deaths. I advocated for “Syndromic Management” in rural areas where testing kits were scarce—a pragmatic approach that focused on saving lives rather than filling databases.
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A health journalist once pressed me on why I was so resistant to the “HCQ wave,” given that generations of Indians remembered popping these pills for malaria. I had to dismantle the nostalgia with cold pharmacology. I explained that the “safety” of the past was an illusion; HCQ was no longer a standard malaria treatment precisely because of its toxicity profile—retinal damage, tinnitus, and the silent threat of QT prolongation in the heart. The argument that the drug worked “in vitro” (in a test tube) was a dangerous seduction; medical history is littered with molecules that killed viruses in a petri dish but failed—or harmed—the human body. To prescribe a drug with known cardiac risks to perfectly healthy staff as a prophylaxis, based on hope rather than data, was to violate the oldest commandment of our trade: Primum non nocere—First, do no harm.
The conversation inevitably turned to the ICMR, the apex body whose advisories were being treated as gospel. The journalist asked if my demand for published data was too harsh given the emergency. I countered that transparency is not a luxury for peaceful times; it is an ethical obligation in a crisis. The ICMR was issuing national directives based on observational studies they refused to make public—studies riddled with selection bias and confounding factors like geography and PPE usage. I argued that “doing something” is not a substitute for “doing science.” By refusing to conduct a Randomized Controlled Trial—the only tool capable of sorting dead ends from life-saving strategies—the authorities were not reducing uncertainty; they were manufacturing it.
When confronted with defenses from colleagues at premier institutes like AIIMS, who cited small, open-label studies to justify the drug, I refused to soften my critique. They were building castles on sand—relying on trials with twenty-six participants or referencing biological theories about G6PD deficiency that didn’t hold up to the 8.5% prevalence in our own population. I told the journalist that the approval of a drug for lupus does not grant it a generic passport for a pandemic. The defense of these flawed studies wasn’t just bad science; it was a symptom of a medical culture that had allowed fear to override evidence. We were trying to treat a virus, but we were ending up treating our own anxiety.
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In the midst of this conformist silence, a piercing voice emerged from Delhi—not from a radical activist, but from a Major General and orthopedician who described himself as a “medical heretic.” In a scathing open letter to the Director of AIIMS, he dismantled the “halo” of the institution. He pointed out a lethal paradox: while the Director’s words were treated as Gospel, the institute’s April 7th flow chart had become a bible of errors. He asked how AIIMS could greenlight Ivermectin when the WHO had explicitly flagged the lack of evidence, effectively accusing the country’s highest medical body of ignoring global scientific consensus.
His critique of Remdesivir was unsparing. He correctly identified its place in the “hall of shame” of modern medicine—a drug that fueled a sordid economy of black marketing and hoarding while offering no survival benefit. But his most damning observation concerned the indiscriminate use of steroids. He lamented that “common sense is not very common,” noting that the blind adherence to AIIMS guidelines had led doctors to pump viral patients full of immunosuppressants too early. He connected the dots that many refused to see: that the guidelines themselves were hastening disease progression and inviting the fungal nightmares that followed.
The letter ended not with a plea, but with a verdict on “vicarious responsibility.” It captured the invisible tragedy of the pandemic: the families who pawned jewelry and sold tiny parcels of land to buy expensive, useless vials because a flow chart told them to. Reading his indictment, I felt a grim solidarity. The General had articulated the central tragedy of the second wave—that in a war-like situation, the nation needed discerning clinicians, but the system had demanded only obedient soldiers.
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Documenting the Failures: The Books and The Future
As the waves subsided, the need to document our systemic failures became urgent. Sahaj Rathi and I contributed to the book compiled by Dr. Yogesh Jain and Dr. Sarah Nabia, discussing the flaws in evidence generation. I also co-authored a book chapter on “Covid Irrational Treatments” (Brill Publishers), ensuring that this era of medical madness was recorded for future generations of students.
We critiqued the ICMR’s role, the opacity of the vaccine rollout (IndiaSpend, Aug 8, 2020), and the lack of transparency in death data (NBC News, Sep 17, 2020). We did not shy away from criticizing the “Secretive Bodies” making decisions (Appeal-Democrat, June 20, 2021).
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The “Sadhana” of Communication
Dr. Sushila Nayar founded MGIMS on Gandhian principles. During the pandemic, I interpreted “Gandhian practice” as the strict adherence to truth—Satya.
Whether it was telling the BBC that a herbal cure was fake, telling the government that their death toll was an undercount, or telling a patient’s family that an expensive injection would not help, the core principle was the same.
My role as a public intellectual during Covid was an extension of my role as a teacher. I was teaching the public how to read science, how to spot a grift, and how to demand better from their healthcare system. The poems, the tweets, and the op-eds were not distractions from my job; they were the essence of it.
In the end, we learned that a pandemic is not just a biological event; it is a social and moral test. Sevagram passed that test not because we had the most ventilators, but because we had the courage to say “No” when the world was screaming “Yes.” That is the legacy I leave to the archives.