India is fighting a healthcare crisis of unimaginable proportions with woefully outdated science

The official Covid-19 treatment protocol in India continues to encourage the use of treatments that many scientists across the world have written off.

Even though these guidelines were revised by the country’s scientific task force on April 22, some of the recommendations in the new document are the same as the initial set that the government had announced in March 2020, when the world hardly knew anything about this virus and Covid-19 cases were only beginning to emerge in India.

A delay in updating these guidelines has led doctors to continue prescribing drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, favipiravir, and ivermectin, which showed early promise but were quickly found to be ineffective. It has also caused a panicked scurry for antiviral drug remdesivir, which became a popular therapy option as India’s case count kept surging past all previous records.

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