New Delhi: The Supreme Court is expected to hear on Wednesday a petition where the parents of two young women who died allegedly due to side-effects associated with Covid vaccination have sought compensation as well as a scrutiny of vaccination records and treatment protocols.
The petitioners have sought the top court’s intervention to form an expert panel to investigate the side-effect of Covid vaccination. They want compensation to be paid to the families of all those who may have died after taking the vaccine.
They later filed an additional affidavit, written submission and also an application to amend the prayers, seeking that all government communication on vaccines “should specify that these are voluntary” and also explain the possible serious adverse events. Also, they want the treatment protocols for such adverse events to be sent to all hospitals.
They want renowned medical practitioners Amitav Banerjee, Jacob Puliyel and Sankha Shubra Chakrabarti on the medical board they have pleaded to form.
The government has objected to the new demands and wants to argue the original petition, citing that the latest application has been filed at a highly belated stage, after pleadings are complete, in order to delay the proceedings.
The parents in their original petition filed in 2022 had alleged that Covid-19 was made out to look like an unprecedented challenge to mankind, and vaccines were touted as the only way out of it by the government and the experts backed by the government without necessary evidence. “The petitioners were also never given any information about serious adverse events of Covid vaccine from the vaccinator,” their joint petition said.
The parents in their original writ petition also sought the expert medical board to be independent of the government to forthwith inquire into and investigate into the deaths of their daughters, and to share the report of the investigation with them. They also appealed the court to issue a direction to the expert medical board to prepare a protocol for early detection and timely treatment for adverse events following immunisation due to Covid-19 vaccine.
In their rejoinder, they alleged that the government failed to heed any early warning signals within the country about potential adverse events.
The government in their response had said that they “only gave it free, but it was a voluntary vaccination programme”, the petitioners said.
According to the parents, the government affidavit was misleading as it failed to mention that the package inserts available at the time of vaccination of their daughters did not mention any information about thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, a rare condition blamed for the death of the two women.
