At the time when the entire country stands united in its fight against the Chinese epidemic COVID-19, the ultra-left wing website – The Quint, notoriously known for spreading false information time and again, attempted to create panic in the society by again indulging in peddling fake news. The portal published views of a so-called epidemic expert, whose earlier prediction on Coronavirus spread was proved to be very wrong.
In an article dated September 17, the leftist propaganda portal firstly, fear-mongers by trying to portray how the coronavirus scourge in India is spreading like in no other country around the world and how India will “soon eclipse the outbreak in the U.S.” Secondly, it attempts to belittle the central government led by Narendra Modi by peddling the theory that a low mortality rate or a high recovery rate is a ‘useless statistic’. And to prove this it quotes some ‘infectious disease experts’. Incidentally, one of the “experts” is Ramanan Laxminarayanan.
Congress used similar narrative to belittle the central government
First and foremost, the claims The Quint uses to spread fear amongst the citizens simply does not hold water, because rather than the total numbers, what matters is the proportion of the population which is infected. India has the second-largest population in the world, and hence, the number of Coronavirus cases per million population is actually what counts and if that is taken into account, India’s position still remains better than many other countries across the globe.
Amusingly, Congress had used a similar narrative a few months ago to belittle the Modi government but was left red-faced.
“Expert” Ramanan Laxminarayanan is not even a doctor, just a PhD in economics
Secondly, the ‘infectious disease expert’ The Quint has quoted to discredit the initiatives of the government and are trying to create panic in the society is no “expert”. Rather, he is not even a doctor but has a PhD in economics. Ramanan Laxminarayanan actually claims to be an economist and has worked for a little-known not-for-profit organisation named Public Health Foundation of India for the last four years.
In fact, the UPA-era public health entrepreneur is the same “expert” who had come up with outlandish claims that India would be facing close to 300 million COVID-19 infections and 2.5 million deaths due to coronavirus outbreak by July. He had made these predictions in interviews given to India Today and Barkha Dutt’s YouTube channel. But the actual numbers in Jule were much less than what he had predicted.
The Quint transforms an engineer to a doctor to peddles fake news regarding India’s efforts in tackling coronavirus
The Quint stooping to this level to berate the Modi government is not at all surprising. The leftist website had earlier, notoriously, transformed an engineer named Girdhar Gyani into a doctor to peddle fake news saying India is already in the middle of stage-3 community transmission of Coronavirus.
The leftist media portal did not stop at this. It even went on to shockingly lie that Gyani was part of the meeting of prominent doctors and healthcare providers chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, 24 March. According to the Quint, Gyani was in the capacity of convenor of the task force on COVID-19 private hospitals created in response to an initiative by NITI Aayog.
However, the claim made by the Quint was proved to be out-an-out fake news. According to the official document released by the Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which had formed the high-level committee of doctors and health experts, in association with NITI Aayog, there was no reference to ‘Doctor’ Gyani being part of the expert group.
