As coronavirus spreads around the world, so too do the quack cures
Emma Graham-Harrison Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro Hannah Ellis-Petersen in New Delhi and Jason Burke in Johannesburg
In India, politicians from the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party have been touting cow urine as a cure for Covid-19. In Tanzania the president has promised that taking communion in church would “burn” the virus away. In Brazil a congressman claimed a day of fasting would halt its spread.
And the leader of the most powerful country in the world, Donald Trump, has been touting as a miracle cure an unproven anti-malarial drug that has contributed to at least one death.
There have also been dubious claims about technology. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced it had invented a device that can detect coronavirus at a distance of 100 metres, using a magnetic field and “bipolar virus”.
And in the UK, Eamonn Holmes, the presenter of ITV’s This Morning, said “many people are rightly concerned”, about conspiracy theories linking the roll-out of 5G mobile phone networks to coronavirus, while insisting he did not believe in the hoaxes himself.
As the global pandemic has worsened, politicians, faith leaders and other authority figures from around the world have touted unscientific methods to tackle its spread.
There are already countless coronavirus-related quack cures, dubious prophylactic schemes or conspiracy theories circulating on social media.
But endorsements from influential men and women mean people are much more likely to take false confidence from unscientific cures. At best these are unproven, at worst some may even exacerbate the virus’s spread.
“Cow urine parties” in India brought hundreds of people together to drink the liquid that some Hindus believe has medicinal properties. A BJP party worker in Kolkata, Narayan Chatterjee, was arrested for organising a cow urine consumption competition just as scientists were warning people to avoid large gatherings.
Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli, halted all international flights over Easter, and closed schools and universities and brought in quarantine for visitors.
But as he was trying to limit some social gatherings, he also urged people to visit churches and mosques, to pray away the disease in large groups. “[The virus] cannot survive in the body of Christ, it will burn,” he told a packed congregation before Easter. “That’s why I did not panic while taking holy communion.”
Religious gatherings of all faiths and denominations have repeatedly proved a vector for infections, even as the most devout insist their faith and God will protect them, with congregations often following their leaders’ guidance to meet.
In Israel cases soared in the ultraorthodox community as much as four to eight times faster than elsewhere in the country, after its leaders dismissed government regulations.
The most senior ultra-orthodox rabbi, Chaim Kanievsky, had initially refused to close packed synagogues and religious seminaries. “The Torah protects and saves,” the 92-year-old said, only in late March relenting and making a call to lone prayer.
In Brazil, Marcos Feliciano, a rightwing pentecostal preacher and congressman, promoted an anti-Covid “day of abstinence” on Sunday 5 April, claiming the fasting would produce a miracle to heal Brazil.
It was sanctioned by Brazil’s farright president, Jair Bolsonaro, whose response to the coronavirus crisis has been denounced as reckless, paranoid and anti-science. Like Trump, he has touted the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine.
Authorities in the Indian state of Kashmir have focused on 10-15 million poplar trees, which they argue “may prove fatal to the public health” by causing hay fever, and have ordered large-scale felling as part of anti-Covid efforts.
Every April the trees shed cottonlike balls; officials say these could cause allergies, with the resulting sneezing and coughing spreading coronavirus. Doctors have questioned this, while activists and conservationists warned the felling would damage the environment and local economy.
A more ostensibly hi-tech response came from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which claimed its new device only needed to be placed in front of coronavirus for five seconds to detect its presence.
The force’s commander in chief, Hossein Salami, claimed an 80% success rate for the “amazing scientific phenomenon” that would be used for mass screening, and added it could be “a very good basis for any kind of virus”.
In videos of the unveiling, the purported new technology resembled fake bomb-detectors once sold to Iraq and Afghanistan by a convicted British fraudster.
Traditional and herbal medicine have been promoted by authority figures around the world, to the consternation of their own governments, world health bodies and even social media firms trying to tackle fake news.
In Venezuela, where the crippled health system was barely coping before coronavirus, the authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, suggested on Twitter that lemongrass and elderberry tea could ward off Covid-19. His message was deleted as part of Twitter’s campaign against coronavirus misinformation.
Another leader to receive a very public reprimand for peddling confusing information is Madagascar’s president, Andry Rajoelina, who recently announced tests on a supposed plant-based “remedy” specific to his country, that he claimed could “change the history of the entire world”. He gave no details.
He has previously been warned by the World Health Organization against making claims about alternative treatments.
And the makers of Hennessy cognac warned Kenyans against believing it would protect them from Covid-19 after the governor of Nairobi, Mike Sonko, urged people to drink alcohol and included bottles of cognac in food handouts for the vulnerable.
An Indian cabinet minister, Shripad Naik, claimed Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, had recovered from coronavirus with the help of Ayurvedic cures. The prince’s spokesman rejected the reports and said he followed NHS medical advice.
In Nigeria, the health minister, Osagie Ehanire, was forced to mobilise after the traditional ruler of the kingdom of Ife claimed a combination of plants including onions, African pepper and neem tree were effective against Covid-19, and said the pandemic had been foretold in June last year.
Ehanire warned that government approval was needed for any treatment, and traditional medicines needed to go through the same scientific tests as all drugs.