Cow Dung, Garlic and a Prayer: The Fight Against Phony Cures for Coronavirus – The Wall Street Journal

“My God, it’s a thing of madness,” Mr. Maduro responded on state television. “Who’s the imbecile, the stupid one who made the decision to block a natural Venezuelan recipe?”

From animal urine to boiled garlic to shots of vinegar, everyone from government officials to shamans to swindlers around the world are touting a host of unproven household remedies as people desperately seek a cure for Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.

For now, there are no vaccines. But as drug firms research treatments that could take more than a year to develop, global health policy makers and social-media companies are immersed in a parallel battle against phony antidotes.

“It’s a problem when they’re sharing a false perception that people are protected when they are not,” said Jarbas Barbosa, assistant director of the Pan-American Health Organization. “Some of these recommendations are in good faith. But then there are also people trying to get some profit from this.”

In Nigeria, authorities have tried to quash rumors that a spicy pepper soup will eliminate the virus and that facial beards help transmit it. For his part, Belarus’s strongman leader, Alexander Lukashenko, said that vodka and a sauna should do the job. In southern Brazil, police said they were investigating an Evangelical church after it promised coronavirus immunity for the faithful.

In India, Hindu nationalist politicians highlighted the perceived purifying qualities of cow excrement, which Hindus consider sacred. “We all know cow dung is very helpful,” said Suman Haripriya, a legislator in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, according to the Press Trust of India.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has touted herbal medicines like lianhua qingwen, used to treat the flu. Officials also promote such remedies at the local level, where doctors on the front line face performance reviews factoring in their use of traditional remedies.

Western doctors are skeptical of the claims of traditional medicines and have warned against purported cures. But the rush for treatments has put some government leaders at odds with medical professionals, and not only in the developing world.

President Trump has faced criticism from health groups for promoting antimalaria medications like chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as a solution despite their still-undetermined efficacy in treating Covid-19. The hype led to a rush on the drug and shortages in some countries, a concern for patients who use them to treat ailments like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, said Dr. Myron Cohen, an immunology and epidemiology expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“It’s not surprising that there is a desperate search for medication,” Dr. Cohen said. “But unexpectedly, some things can prove not to be safe and can make the illness worse.”

Twitter says it is coordinating with the World Health Organization and has ramped up efforts to remove posts with disinformation on Covid-19. In a recent blog post, the company said it had widened its definition of harmful content to prohibit posts that run counter to public-health guidelines, deny the outbreak or propose either harmful or ineffective treatments.

On its website, the WHO has compiled a list of myth-busting guidelines to stop the dissemination of unreliable treatments, including some calling for people to spray their body with alcohol, nasal saline washes or to take a hot bath to kill the virus with heat.

In decades researching tropical diseases in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Davidson Hamer said he has seen numerous traditional healing methods like herbal concoctions, religious ceremonies and the smearing of animal feces. Working around traditional belief systems is even more difficult when influential political and religious figures promote them, he said.

“People are always trying to find something that works, and rumors abound,” said Dr. Hamer, professor of global health and medicine at Boston University. “Unfortunately, in many low-income countries, there’s a lot of superstition and people can be susceptible to bad ideas.”

Populist leaders in Latin America have provided their own prescription for the virus. At a recent news conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador held up little red amulets with Catholic and Evangelical messages that he said he carried as protection against Covid-19. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who asserts the virus won’t hurt athletes like him, also had two video posts on Twitter taken down for boasting of the benefits of chloroquine and defying social-distancing norms.

But few world leaders find themselves in a more precarious position than Mr. Maduro in Venezuela, where the public health-care system has collapsed amid a seven-year depression. Infectious-disease experts say the country is an incubator for diphtheria, measles, dengue and other contagions.

And because large numbers of Venezuelans have little access to information beyond state propaganda, Mr. Maduro’s health advice may be the only counsel many will get.

The leftist leader and his aides have said the U.S. created the virus to harm China, which ranks among his top allies. On a recent night, Mr. Maduro read some anticoronavirus advice he said he received from a doctor: a tea made of elderberry, black pepper, lemon rinds, ginger and honey. While Mr. Maduro’s subsequent posts promoting the recipe were taken down from Twitter, they remain accessible on Venezuelan state media and pro-regime news sites.

“That virus has a remedy,” Mr. Maduro said, calling the concoction a natural antibiotic. “It’s easy. But the multinational pharmaceutical companies will say it doesn’t work. It’s a remedy that our ancestors lived on.”

—Liyan Qi in Beijing, Krishna Pokharel in New Delhi and Luciana Magalhaes in São Paulo contributed to this article.

Write to Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com