There is no evidence that supports the claim of the social media users and hence the post is misleading.
While scientists, pharmacologists, experts are working tirelessly 24×7 to find an antidote for COVID-19, social media users are coming up with bizarre remedies and sharing them.
A post has gone viral on various social media platforms claiming that the Chinese doctor who first detected the deadly coronavirus had documented a few case files and proposed treatment for the disease.
The chemical compounds required to cure Covid-19 can be found in tea, the doctor had suggested, according to the post.
It went on to claim that the news was first published by CNN.
Maria Celia Junio-Fernandez and many others have shared the post on Facebook.
They claim, ‘Breaking News from CNN:- Dr Li Wenliang, China’s hero doctor who was punished for telling the truth about coronavirus and later died due to the same disease, had documented casefiles for research purposes and had in the case files proposed a cure that would significantly decrease the impact of the Covid-19 on the human body… What’s more shocking is that these complex words that were so difficult for people in China to understand is actually called tea in India, YES, our regular tea has all these chemicals already in it.’
Viral Facebook post
Maria Celia urged her family and friends to share the post widely. She also claims;
“The hospital staff in china has started serving tea to the patients three times a day.”
Here is the archived version of the post.
Within hours, the post has been shared by around 1,000 people.
India Today Anti-Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the post to be misleading.
We checked out the CNN website, but could not find any such news. We searched their Twitter handle for breaking news, but no such thing was reported.
We found a report about China’s whistleblower doctor on CNN but that article too does not talk about the medication he suggested nor does it talk about the utility of the chemical compounds of tea as claimed by social media users.
Here’s CNN Breaking News’s Twitter handle.
On Google search too, we found no reports that support the claim. Also, there are no reports that doctors in China are serving tea to Covid-19 patients.
We found a news report by China Daily related to this topic.
According to this report, researchers from the Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention found through experiments that because of its chemical components, drinking tea could help prevent novel coronavirus infections.
But later the article was removed by the Zhejiang CDC on February 26, China Daily reported.
As of now, scientists are still working on trying to create a vaccine for Covid-19.
Here is an article published in The New York Times.
A few tentative medications are suggested but they are yet to be proved useful. The World Health Organization (WHO) also does not mention any specific medication.
So it can be concluded that there is no evidence that supports the claim of the social media users and hence the post is misleading.
Source: INDIA TODAY
