Did Top Medical Body's Decisions Add To India Covid Chaos? Experts Say...

India struggled to curb the world's fastest coronavirus surge this summer, and public health experts are warning that the country is ill prepared to face a possible third wave of infections.

For a century, the Indian Council of Medical Research was a little known government body quietly studying illnesses in New Delhi. But during the pandemic, it's taken on a role akin to Anthony Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the U.S. -- a powerful position that's made it a controversial face of India's struggles with Covid-19. As the ICMR has acted as a key medical adviser to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his health ministry, it's increasingly drawn criticism from the nation's doctors and independent scientists, who have questioned its drug recommendations and the group's lack of transparency on data related to variants identified in India that are now spreading globally. India struggled to curb the world's fastest coronavirus surge this summer, and public health experts are warning that the country is ill prepared to face a possible third wave of infections. Some of the ICMR's decisions during the pandemic reflect the broad chaos that's dogged India's overwhelmed government apparatus, and have ended up benefiting the pharmaceutical industry rather than patients, critics say. In April last year, physician SP Kalantri -- who helps runs a 1,000 bed hospital in the village of Sevagram -- wrote to the international scientific journal, The Lancet, strongly criticizing the ICMR for signing off on the health ministry's decision to recommend the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a Covid therapy. The medicine remained on India's virus guidelines for almost a year after the drug, once embraced by Donald Trump, was discarded as a treatment for Covid in the U.S.