India Likely To Have Achieved Covid Herd Immunity As We Are A Country Of Ignorant, Illiterate And In-Disciplined People: Rajiv Bajaj

The Managing Director of Bajaj Auto Rajiv Bajaj in an interview with NDTV has termed India as a very populist country with a large number of illiterate, ignorant and in-disciplined people.

In response to a question on Bajaj's controversial anti-Covid lockdown views, the scion doubled down on his views by claiming that India has already achieved herd immunity and added that, "however bitter it may sound that we are a very populist country of relatively large number of illiterate, ignorant and very large number of in-disciplined people, so when you put all this together you get herd immunity".

Bajaj claimed that the lockdown should have been customised and calibrated to allow young people to go out to work, "I don't buy the rubbish about you have to protect your elders, we all know how to do that".

Bajaj also insinuated that he is rather willing to go through a Covid-19 infection with mild symptoms rather than take a vaccine to prevent it.

In the interview Bajaj went on to express scepticism over the Covid-19 vaccine by stating that the risks outweigh the benefits, "between being for or against there is a middle path where you ask yourself do the risks outweigh the benefit and for someone like me I believe they do..".

Rajiv Bajaj has been a trenchant critic of lockdown as a method to control the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. He had advocated homeopathy and herd immunity as the way forward to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Bajaj had said that homeopathy has been documented to be quite effective in pandemics similar to coronavirus. He claimed that both in 1918 Spanish Flu or the recent Cuban epidemic, the doctors who treated their patients with homeopathy lost a fraction of patients as compared to those who were treated with allopathic medicine.

At least 300 employees at Bajaj Auto's Waluj plant at Aurangabad had tested positive for Covid-19 and around six to eight employees had also succumbed to the disease. The company was also forced to temporarily shut the plant due to the rising Covid-19 cases.