Giloy During COVID: What Science Actually Found vs What Was Claimed

The verdict in 30 seconds

What happened — a brief timeline

What is Giloy, traditionally?

Giloy is the climbing shrub Tinospora cordifolia, also known as Guduchi or "Amrita" (the nectar of immortality) in Sanskrit. It is one of the most-cited rasayana herbs in classical Ayurveda, traditionally used for fevers, jaundice, and general weakness.

That is the traditional context. It is not a clinical claim.

What clinical evidence actually exists for "immunity"

This is the section the public conversation skipped.

I searched PubMed for `Tinospora cordifolia AND human` filtered to RCT designs. Most of the published immunomodulatory work is in vitro on immune cell lines or in animal models. The handful of human studies are small, generally fewer than 60 participants, and use surrogate immune-marker outcomes rather than clinical endpoints like infection rates or hospitalisation.

There is no published large-scale RCT showing that Giloy reduces respiratory infection rates, COVID severity, or hospitalisation outcomes in adults.

The liver-injury cluster — what the published case series found

This is the part of the story that should have stayed in the conversation longer than it did.

What the case series actually documents — patient by pattern

I want to walk through the 2022 Hepatology Communications case series in more detail because the headline number — 43 patients — undersells how methodically the paper documents the clinical pattern.

The patients ranged in age from 21 to 71, with a median age in the mid-40s. More than half were female. Most had been taking Giloy as a self-prescribed supplement for COVID-19 prevention or post-recovery "immunity support," in line with the public messaging at the time. None had a documented prior diagnosis of autoimmune liver disease.

The clinical presentation clustered into three patterns. Acute hepatitis with significant liver enzyme elevation — the most common presentation. Acute-on-chronic worsening in patients with previously stable underlying liver disease. And in the most severe cases, acute liver failure requiring hospitalisation.

The median time from starting Giloy to symptom onset was 46 days. That detail matters. It suggests an immune-mediated mechanism rather than direct toxic injury, because direct toxins typically produce earlier symptoms. Liver biopsy in the cases where it was performed showed features consistent with autoimmune-feature hepatitis — a pattern where the immune system targets the liver in response to a triggering exposure.

A subset of cases tested positive for autoantibodies, most commonly anti-nuclear antibody. This is not the same as classical autoimmune hepatitis but suggests Giloy may unmask underlying autoimmune predisposition in some patients. Two samples submitted for testing contained heavy-metal contamination above prescribed limits — adding a contamination layer to the pharmacological signal.

How this episode compares to ashwagandha's safety story

Readers who have read both this article and our Ashwagandha scorecard will notice a pattern: both herbs are now associated with peer-reviewed case series of acute liver injury, both published in 2023, both from Indian researchers including Dr. Cyriac A. Philips and colleagues.

This is not coincidence. It is the maturation of pharmacovigilance for traditional herbal medicines in India. The scientific community is finally beginning to systematically document adverse events that the broader public health system has not historically tracked.

The honest implication: the "essentially benign" framing that wrapped traditional Indian herbs for decades is being revised — not in a way that says "all Ayurvedic herbs are dangerous" but in a way that says "we should hold these herbs to the same pharmacovigilance standards we hold pharmaceutical drugs."

That is a healthy correction. It is uncomfortable for marketing, and it is good for readers.

What I think happened during 2020 and 2021

I want to write this section carefully because the dynamics of pandemic-era public health communication are complicated.

In early 2020, India faced a respiratory pandemic with no proven pharmaceutical prevention or early-stage treatment. The AYUSH Ministry, like other government agencies globally, was under pressure to offer something — anything — that gave the public a sense of agency. Their March 2020 advisory listed several traditional herbs and household practices.

Indian media amplified these recommendations broadly, often without the qualifications that the original advisory included. Celebrities and influencers extended the claims. Supplement brands rapidly capitalised on the wave.

By 2021 the advisory's qualifications had largely fallen out of public conversation. "Giloy boosts immunity against COVID" became a freestanding claim divorced from its original context.

Then the case series landed in early 2022. The medical conversation pivoted. The popular conversation mostly didn't.

This is the editorial puzzle a publication like HerbVerdict has to grapple with. We are not here to relitigate pandemic-era policy. We are here to make sure that, going forward, the gap between traditional indications and clinical evidence stays visible to the readers who are about to make purchasing decisions.

Why I won't blame the government — and won't excuse the gap either

I am not going to write that the AYUSH Ministry "lied." That would be unfair and inaccurate. AYUSH advisories during the pandemic listed Giloy as a herb traditionally used for fevers and immunity — language consistent with classical Ayurvedic use. They were operating under enormous public pressure to offer something.

What I will write is this. The gap between "traditionally used for X" and "clinically demonstrated to do X" is a gap regulators, ministries, and journalists should keep visible to the public. When that gap collapses — when traditional indications get presented as clinical efficacy — readers end up downstream of decisions they didn't have the evidence to make.

That is the editorial lesson of the Giloy episode, and the reason HerbVerdict will keep separating those two registers very deliberately on every page.

Why the misidentification hypothesis hasn't resolved the debate

Some defenders of Giloy have argued that the 2022 case series may reflect misidentification of the source herb — that what patients were ingesting was not pure Tinospora cordifolia but other Tinospora species (like T. crispa, which is more clearly hepatotoxic) or contaminated/adulterated material.

This is a legitimate scientific question. The case series authors themselves discuss it. Indian retail Giloy is sold as juice, capsules, churna, and dried stem — all of which can be sourced from related but not identical species, and quality control across the supply chain is uneven.

But two points push against the misidentification hypothesis being a complete explanation. First, the cases came from nine cities and 13 hospitals, suggesting the issue was not localised to a single contaminated source. Second, the autoimmune-feature hepatitis pattern is consistent with a host-immune response to a structural feature of the herb, not just a toxicological injury from contamination.

The honest reading: misidentification and contamination probably account for some of the 43 cases but cannot account for all of them. The species-level identity of the consumed plant is unlikely to fully exonerate Giloy as a category.

What this episode tells us about the broader herb-induced liver injury picture

The Giloy case series is part of a wider story. Indian hepatologists — particularly Dr. Cyriac A. Philips and his colleagues — have been systematically documenting herb-induced liver injury (HILI) cases from Indian Ayurvedic, Siddha, and Unani products for over a decade.

Their published series cover Tinospora (Giloy), Withania somnifera (ashwagandha), various polyherbal formulations, and traditional metallic preparations (rasashastra products). The pattern is consistent: Indian traditional medicine has a real but under-acknowledged HILI signal, particularly when products contain heavy metal contamination, are taken at high doses for extended periods, or are used in patients with unrecognised autoimmune predisposition.

This is not a story about Ayurveda being uniquely dangerous. Western herbal medicine has its own HILI literature — kava, comfrey, green tea extract, various weight-loss supplements. Pharmaceutical drugs cause significantly more documented hepatotoxicity than herbal preparations do. The Ayurvedic HILI signal is real but proportionate.

What the Giloy episode adds is the specific lesson that mass public health promotion of an under-studied herbal intervention can amplify rare adverse events into clinically meaningful population-level signals. That is a lesson for regulators, ministries, and journalists — not just for individual readers.

What journalists and health communicators got wrong during 2020-2021

I want to write this section explicitly because I think it's the editorial story most worth telling.

During the pandemic, Indian English-language media largely amplified AYUSH advisories without applying the same evidentiary scrutiny that would be applied to mainstream pharmaceutical claims. A news article reporting "Bharat Biotech announces Phase 3 trial results for Covaxin" would, rightly, lead with sample size, design, and limitations. A news article reporting "AYUSH Ministry recommends Giloy as immunity booster" generally did not.

This double standard is not unique to India and not unique to Giloy. The structural reason is that traditional medicine is often categorised in newsroom assignment as "lifestyle" rather than "health," with different editorial expectations. Lifestyle journalism is less likely to require trial citations and clinical-evidence vetting.

The 2022 case series should have prompted a recalibration. To the credit of some Indian medical-journalism outlets — The Wire Science, Down To Earth, parts of The Hindu's health desk — it did. But the recalibration did not propagate evenly across the broader media ecosystem.

This is the editorial gap HerbVerdict exists to fill. Not to discredit traditional medicine, not to elevate pharmaceutical alternatives, but to treat herbal claims with the same evidentiary expectations as any other health claim.

What this means for you, in April 2026

If you are healthy, have no liver disease, and are taking small doses of well-sourced Giloy as part of a traditional preparation, the case-series literature suggests the absolute risk of liver injury is low — but not zero, and rising with dose and duration.

If you have any chronic liver condition, take hepatotoxic medications, are pregnant, or are on immunomodulators, the risk-benefit math is meaningfully different. Speak to a clinician.

If you are buying Giloy because of an "immunity" claim — particularly a claim made during the pandemic that has since gone quiet — this is a good moment to revisit whether the evidence has caught up.

What this article is — and is not — saying

I want to close with this clarification because the Giloy story is exactly the kind of topic that gets misread in either direction.

This article is not saying Giloy is dangerous. It is saying Giloy has documented rare adverse events that consumers deserve to know about, and that those adverse events change the calculus for some people (those with pre-existing liver disease, on hepatotoxic medication, with autoimmune predisposition) more than for others.

This article is not saying the AYUSH Ministry acted in bad faith during the pandemic. It is saying that pandemic-era health communication amplified traditional indications into clinical claims, and that the gap between "traditionally used for fevers" and "clinically proven to prevent COVID" is a gap regulators and journalists should keep visible.

This article is not saying classical Ayurveda was wrong about Giloy. The classical rasayana framing is a coherent traditional position. It is a different kind of claim from a clinical-trial efficacy claim, and conflating the two is what got us into this mess.

What this article is saying: track the published evidence, weight the case literature appropriately, treat traditional indications and clinical efficacy as separate registers, and apply the same evidentiary standards to herbal interventions that you would apply to any other health claim.

That posture is harder than either uncritical promotion or knee-jerk dismissal. It is also the posture HerbVerdict will keep across every herb, every product, every page.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Kulkarni AV et al. Tinospora Cordifolia (Giloy)–Induced Liver Injury During the COVID-19 Pandemic—Multicenter Nationwide Study From India. Hepatol Commun. 2022;6(6):1289–1300. PMC 9134809
2. Nagral A et al. Tinospora Cordifolia (Giloy) and Autoimmune-like Liver Injury — Primum Non Nocere. J Clin Exp Hepatol. 2021. PMC 8416289
3. Tinospora cordifolia (Guduchi/Giloy)-Induced Liver Injury: A Case Review. Cureus. 2023. PubMed 37273324
4. LiverTox: Clinical and Research Information on Drug-Induced Liver Injury. Tinospora. NIDDK; 2024. NCBI Bookshelf NBK608429

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