The pandemic was fought in two arenas. The first was the sterile, terrifying silence of the ICU. The second was the cacophony of the television studio and the smartphone screen — screaming anchors, thirty-second soundbites, a breaking-news ticker that moved faster than the virus. For decades I had been a creature of the first world, my audience a batch of medical students or a frightened family in the OPD. But by the second wave, my patients were arriving with damaged minds as well as damaged lungs — convinced a ₹12,000 antiviral would save them, or that a herbal “coronil” kit was a shield against death. If I wanted to save the patient in Bed 4, I had to fight the misinformation that had put him there. With deep reluctance, I traded the stethoscope for a webcam.

When Prose Fails, Poetry Speaks

By mid-2020, citing p-values and confidence intervals was not moving a frightened public. Data bounces off the armour of fear; satire finds the gaps. On Twitter, I began writing in the voice of the drugs themselves.

The first was Hydroxychloroquine, pleading in verse to be tested in a proper trial before its praises were sung. The second, weeks later, was Favipiravir — displacing HCQ as the new promise of hope on the strength of a trial involving barely eighty to a hundred and fifty patients, marketed as a game-changer at ₹12,500 a course while shortening a fever, at best, by a single day:

Both poems went viral. They did what a hundred academic lectures could not: they made people pause and question the narrative. I wasn’t turning to poetry to escape science — I was using it to defend science.

The Studio: Choosing Wisely, And the Rural Reality Check

The most consequential broadcast conversation was with BOOM Live and the journalist Govindraj Ethiraj, ostensibly on “Choosing the Right Medicines.” By 2021 the medical establishment had become a bazaar — “Covid Kits” reading like grocery lists, Zinc, Vitamin C, Doxycycline, Ivermectin, Favipiravir, steroids, all at once. On air I had to be the killjoy: none of this works. My argument for “Minimalist Medicine” — oxygen, proning, steroids only for the hypoxic — was often met with incredulity. But surely we must do something? Activity is not achievement. Prescribing a useless drug is not doing something; it is doing harm, in money and in false hope.

I also wanted the cameras turned toward the village, not just Delhi and Mumbai’s oxygen queues. In interviews with Rema Nagarajan of The Times of India and with IndiaSpend and The Wire, I tried to puncture the romantic lie that rural India was somehow safer. Ventilators had been dumped in district hospitals without training anyone to use them — like handing a Ferrari to a man who has never driven — and a ventilator, I told Rema, can kill you if you don’t know how to use it. The CoWIN app, hailed as a technological marvel, was a wall for a daily-wage patient expected to generate an OTP and download a certificate: we were vaccinating the privileged while the virus hunted the poor.

The Coalition and Financial Toxicity

Out of these fights came a loose but fierce coalition — journalists Priyanka Pulla, Rema Nagarajan, Banjot Kaur, and Malini Aisola; the whistleblower and public-health activist Dinesh S. Thakur; and C.S. Pramesh, Director of Tata Memorial Hospital, with whom late-night conversations on flawed testing protocols grew into co-authored pieces in The Lancet and Nature Medicine on “Choosing Wisely” during Covid. With Thakur I wrote a reasoned challenge to Favipiravir’s approval in The Hindu. Together we dissected the pricing of Remdesivir and Tocilizumab, and coined the term “Financial Toxicity” for the extra cost the poor paid for the ignorance of the rich — every hyped miracle cure spiking the black-market price of a drug in Wardha. I told these stories to whoever would carry them, on the BBC World Service, on VICE News, in the Times of India, in Deccan Herald: farmers selling their wives’ mangalsutras for a vial of Remdesivir I knew would not save their dying father.

A health journalist once pressed me on why I resisted HCQ so hard, given generations of Indians remembered it for malaria. I had to dismantle the nostalgia with pharmacology: HCQ was no longer standard malaria treatment precisely because of its toxicity — retinal damage, tinnitus, QT prolongation — and a molecule that kills a virus in a test tube can still fail, or harm, the human body. When she asked whether demanding published data was too harsh for an emergency, I said transparency is not a luxury for peaceful times; it is an ethical obligation in a crisis. The ICMR was issuing national directives from observational studies it refused to publish, riddled with selection bias. “Doing something” is not a substitute for doing science.

The General’s Letter

In the midst of that conformist silence, a piercing voice emerged from Delhi — not a radical activist but a Major General and orthopaedician who called himself a “medical heretic,” in a scathing open letter to the Director of AIIMS. He dismantled the institution’s halo, pointing out that its April flow chart had become a bible of errors: how could AIIMS greenlight Ivermectin when the WHO had explicitly flagged the lack of evidence? His critique of Remdesivir placed it, correctly, in medicine’s hall of shame — a drug that fuelled black-marketing while offering no survival benefit. His sharpest observation concerned steroids: “common sense is not very common,” he wrote, and blind adherence to guidelines had doctors pumping viral patients full of immunosuppressants too early, hastening the disease and inviting the fungal nightmare that followed. He closed not with a plea but a verdict on vicarious responsibility — families pawning jewellery and selling land for expensive, useless vials because a flow chart told them to. Reading it, I felt grim solidarity. He had named the second wave’s central tragedy: the country needed discerning clinicians and the system had demanded only obedient soldiers.

As the waves subsided, documenting these failures felt urgent. Sahaj Rathi and I contributed to a volume compiled by Yogesh Jain and Sarah Nabia on the flaws in our evidence-generation during the crisis; I co-authored a chapter on “Covid Irrational Treatments” for Brill, so that this era of medical madness would be on the record for the students who come after.

Dr Sushila Nayar founded MGIMS on Gandhian principles, and during the pandemic I came to understand “Gandhian practice” as strict adherence to Satya — truth. Telling the BBC a herbal cure was fake, telling the government its death toll was an undercount, telling a family an expensive injection would not help: it was the same principle, spoken in different rooms. The poems, the tweets, the interviews were never a distraction from the job of Medical Superintendent. They were the job, extended into a public square that a doctor cannot, in a crisis, afford to cede to the grifter.