A viral video (here and here) alleges to show that Cardiologist Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty was beaten by a representative of a pharmaceutical company on live television. It is being claimed that the pharma representative got riled up after Dr. Shetty said that big pharma companies are playing with the lives of old people by selling harmful drugs. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty getting attacked by a pharma company representative on live television.
Fact: This is an old video from 2017 that shows a brawl between the panelists on a show by News Nation. This debate did not feature Dr Devi Shetty. Also, the bit in the viral video where Dr. Shetty allegedly explains the attack and further talks about a drug created by Natural herbs is also fake; it is created by adding a fake voiceover on Dr. Shetty’s interview that he gave to ‘NDTV.’ Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the authenticity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search on the internet to see if media outlets had reported any such attack on Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty on live television. This search yielded no credible news reports on Aaj Tak( the logo of this channel is in the viral video) or any other media outlet.
We then performed a keyword search online to learn more about the viral video. This search led us to a video uploaded by ‘News Nation’ on their official verified YouTube channel, which contained the visuals of a man getting attacked in a TV studio.
This video, uploaded in January 2017, is a clip from a TV debate held by News Nation featuring Bigg Boss fame ‘Swami Om.’ This panel did not feature Dr. Shetty. The person getting slapped in the video is actually an associate of Swami Om.
A search about the clip of the viral video where Dr. Shetty allegedly speaks about the attack on him and then talks about natural medicine that allegedly cleans cholesterol in the body led us to the original video from which this clip was taken.
This is an interview that he gave to ‘NDTV Profit’ in November 2022, in which he speaks about Heart attacks. Nowhere in this whole interview, he spoke about this alleged attack in a TV studio. This makes it clear that his video clip from this interview was used, and a fake voice-over was added to peddle a false narrative of Dr. Shetty getting attacked by a pharma representative on live television and him talking about it and a drug that gets rid of body cholesterol.
To sum up, the person getting slapped in a TV studio in this video is not Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty.
