Satyendar Jain Cites Memory Loss Due To Covid Amid ED's Hawala Probe: Can It Really Happen? What Science Says

Amid the ongoing investigations against Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain in a money laundering case, reports suggest that Jain said he had Covid-induced memory loss when asked certain questions pertaining to the case. On Tuesday, a court in Delhi reserved its order against the bail plea of Jain, arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case. Special Judge Geetanjali Goel reserved the order after hearing arguments from Jain as well as the ED. The agency had taken Jain into custody under criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. He is currently in judicial custody.

However, in a statement to the trial court regarding certain statements made by Jain, ED said that Jain had claimed he had lost his memory due to Covid-19. According to reports, Jain told the ED that he had lost his memory due to Covid-19 when confronted with certain documents relating to his membership in trusts and groups that received funds for hawala transactions. The Additional Solicitor General (ASG) S V Raju confirmed the statement, as per reports.

The case against Satyender Jain

The ED case against Satyendar Jain is based on an FIR registered in 2017 by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) under the Prevention of Corruption Act. The CBI's complaint stated that Jain couldn’t explain the source of funds received by four companies in which he was a shareholder.  In April this year, ED had provisionally attached immovable properties belonging to companies allegedly linked to Satyendar Jain and his relatives. The immovable properties of Jain and his relatives were said to be worth Rs 4.81 crore. 

Jain had tested positive for Covid-19 in June 2020 during the first wave of Covid-19 in Delhi and had been shifted to Rajiv Gandhi Multispecialty Hospital where he recuperated from the reportedly high-grade fever. 

The neurological impact of Covid-19

While Jain claimed he lost his memory when confronted with hawala papers, here's what research by the medical community has found regarding the subject. 

According to neurologist Omar Danoun of the Henry Ford Health institute in the US, Covid-19 can induce a range of neurological disorders such as problems with memory, brain fog, strokes, seizures and neuropathy which refers to numbness in the extremities of the body such as hands and feet. Danoun adds that Covid-19 has been noted to be a neuro-invasive virus that can affect the brain and surrounding nerve clusters. The loss of smell caused by Covid-19 is often seen as a result of such neuroinvasion. 

Covid-19 has also been known to cause cases of encephalitis or brain inflammation. 

Covid-19 and Memory Loss

In a paper published in Harvard Health, Tamara Fong who is part of the Covid Survivorship Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center wrote a majority of Covid-19 recoverees she worked with complained of issues like concentration loss, forgetfulness and confusion. Memory loss and brain fog are thus commonly linked symptoms of after-effects of Covid. Fong also noted that long Covid can affect the three basic aspect of cognition - memory, attention, executive action.  

A 2022 cross-sectional study (Long COVID-19: Objectifying most self-reported neurological symptoms) of adult patients with confirmed Covid-19 revealed that patients with both severe and mild Covid including those who were hospitalised showed signs of cognitive and neurological impact. In another study, a team of University of Cambridge researchers in the UK found that 70 per cent of the Covid-19 patients they surveyed across the country had experienced some form of memory loss. The study also noted that among the 126 participants with long Covid who were surveyed, 77.8 per cent reported concentration issues, 69 per cent experienced brain fog, 67.5 per cent reported forgetfulness, 59.5 per cent problems with recalling common words and 43.7 per cent said they struggled with saying or typing the correct word. The hypothesis has been confirmed by several other researchers and studies as well. Another recent study by Oxford University found that Covid-19 caused the brain to shrink, a phenomenon that impacted the grey matter in the brain's areas that control memory and emotion. 

Satyender Jain's statements are yer to be corroborated by his medical records. But preliminary research into the topic shows that memory loss could indeed be a symptom of long Covid and may persist for months after formal recovery from Covid-19. 

Dissociative Amnesia

Sudden retrograde memory loss, in the absence of neurological causes, is usually referred to as a dissociative symptom. Dissociative amnesia, defined in the DSM-V as an inability to remember important autobiographical experiences, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, is however a controversial phenomenon. Critics have often referred to the ambiguous nature of the case studies diagnostic processes used for patients with such type of amnesia. Critics claim that such studies have also failed to definitely rule out plausible alternative explanations, such as everyday forgetfulness emerging after a trauma, ordinary forgetting and encoding failure, organic causes or malingering, or simply not thinking about something for a long time. In 2022, a paper by B Basagni outlines the case of an adolescent who reported sudden retrograde memory loss, without an organic cause detectable, amid the Covid-19 lockdown. While the study was unable to pin-point the cause of the memory loss, it concluded that "interpretation of sudden unexplained amnesias probably refers to a complex interaction between predisposing psychosocial factors and distress, and a single explanation is not detectable".