Fact Check: VP of this company did not participate in COVID-19 clinical trials being conducted by his firm, viral claim is fake

A photo is going viral on social media, mainly on WhatsApp where Bharat Biotech’s Vice President, Dr. VK Srinivas can be seen sitting with another medial professional. The post is claiming that Dr. VK Srinivas himself volunteered to participate in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial.
The Vishvas News found in its investigation that this viral post is false. Dr. VK Srinivas was giving his blood sample for routine procedure when this photo was clicked. He did not participate in COVID19 clinical trial.

What is going viral?

The description of this post reads ‘Dr. VK Srinivas, Vice-President of Bharath Biotech, He is taking first injection of COVID 19 vaccine. They have confidence in their product’
This post was shared by a facebook page named At News.
An archive version of this Facebook Post can be found here.

Investigation :

Vishvas News investigated to find out if this post was genuine. We searched this photo using Google Reverse Image search but couldn’t find anything substantial.

Then we decided to search about this news with keywords on Google. We found that The Bharath Biotech company, Hyderabad, is doing a research on Covid-19 vaccine.

We also found a statement by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on clinical trials. It details many of the researches undertaken by the company. They also described the progress of vaccine research. The trial is being conducted jointly by the National Institute of Virology-Pune, ICMR and Bharat Biotech International Limited. After all the trials are completed, the Indian Biotech Vaccine is expected to be available by August 15th. Additionally the statement also seeks volunteers who wish to participate in the vaccine trials to register by July 7. The announcement was made on July 2nd.

We contacted Bharat Biotech on mail, to which they replied that their tweet on the matter should be considered their official statement on this fake news.

To check, we searched the official Twitter account of Bharath Biotech. We found a tweet with clarification on the viral claim. The tweet confirms that this claim is wrong. This photo was taken when Dr VK Srinivas was giving blood sample for a routine procedure, not participating in clinical trial.

This post was shared by a facebook page named ‘The At News’. The user has 7,115 followers on Facebook.