Pseudoscience thrives during the Covid pandemic in COVID Response Watch — by Arka Deep — 17/02/2022 https://countercurrents.org/2022/02/pseudoscience-thrives-during-the-covid-pandemic/ Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, stirred up a series of trolls and memes on social media recently by claiming that “Corona does not spread in salt water”, during a press conference related to the Gangasagar Mela.
During the early days of the pandemic, on March 2 of 2020, Suman Haripriya, an elected representative from the Bharatiya Janata Party, said that cow-urine and cow dung can be deployed as a remedy against Covid infections. Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and one of the poster boys of Hindutva in India, even asked citizens to practice yoga in order to gain strength against several diseases, including COVID-19.
If this were not enough, the Union Ministry of AYUSH, set up to promote and regulate so-called traditional practices of medicine, put out a statement claiming that homeopathy can be used as a preventive treatment for COVID, while UNANI can be used for symptomatic treatment.
Back in 2020, the then-President of West Bengal BJP Dilip Ghosh, known for his loose talk said that drinking cow urine helps to battle Covid. Allegedly, many go-mutra parties were also held.
Pseudoscience has always given legitimacy to fascist governments. In a book on the Nazis of Germany named “Hitler’s monsters”, Eric Kurlander has shown how supernatural ideas, and ideas derived from religious myths had helped Hitler in garnering mass support for his German supremacy project.