Punjab: HC stays arrest of 2 doctors booked for making fake COVID reports
Punjab: The Punjab and Haryana High Court has recently given restrainment order to the Punjab Police regarding the arrest of two doctors and asked them to submit investigation report regarding the incident of making fake COVID-19 report for which the doctors were arrested.
This came after the high court considered the plea of the two doctors who approached High Court to seek anticipatory bail against the FIR registered on June 23rd by Punjab Vigilance Bureau alleging that the doctors were involved in making false COVID positive certificates.
The Medical Dialogues team previously reported that the accused doctors who were allegedly involved in making false COVID test positive reports applied for bail in the session court but the additional session court judge rejected their bail plea. The accused doctors included the owner of Tuli Diagnostic Centre where they allegedly made false reports of patients stating that they are COVID positive to fleece them.
Three of the patient tested to be COVID positive according to their lab's reports, actually turned out to be COVID negative after going through a test at Government Medical College Amritsar. Following this, on June 23rd the Punjab Vigilance Bureau after investigating the matter registered the case against the owner of the laboratory, his wife, a doctor of Pathology and another doctor associated with preparing the false Lab reports.
According to HT, the state's counsel, GS Dhuriwala submitted to the court that the matter is still getting investigated by the medical board. The investigation report claimed that 72 cases were declared positive by Diagnostic Centre and he also informed the court that cycle threshold values were handwritten on test requisition slips. Moreover, no printout from the machine was available for examination and no raw data or graph was present to check the authenticity of the reports by matching them with those generated by the machine.
However, advocate appearing for doctors, senior advocate RS Rai argued that the reports are in fact computer generated and there might be a noting on the side of computerized reports regarding Covid-19 Virus Qualitative PCR, reports the daily.
Then, the high court bench of justice Jaishree Thakur has asked the medical board to submit the investigation report and also to present photocopies of 72 positive reports purported to have been handwritten.
While confirming that the next hearing for the proceeding will be on 17th August, the court further added that apart from these reports, if there is other evidence available against the petitioners, that too is to be submitted. After that, the court stayed the arrest of both the petitioner doctors.
Next Story