The government was in denial and when the incident came to the public domain, it made a desperate attempt at burying it.
Dr Kafeel Khan, who has received a bail after spending over eight months in the jail in a case related to BRD Medical College tragedy, talks to Prabir Purkayastha of Newsclick about the incident. Khan was reportedly made the scapegoat when the shortage in the oxygen supply allegedly resulted in death of 23 children in the Gorakhpur hospital on August 10, 2018. Khan dismisses the government’s narrative that the cause of the deaths was encephalitis. According to him, the government was in denial and when the incident came to the public domain, it made a desperate attempt at burying it. He says that the dearth of oxygen definitely played a role in accelerating mortality of the children.