New Delhi, Nov 19 (PTI) A group of families claiming to have lost their kin or suffered side effects of Covid vaccines on Tuesday asked the government to set up fast-track courts to provide justice to them and also sought financial compensation.
Addressing a press conference here, the families along with doctors and lawyers demanded action against officials who “misguided and coerced” people into taking the vaccines. They urged the government to provide full disclosure of all the side effects.
While there was no immediate official response, the government and several doctors in the past have rejected the claims of side effects of Covid jabs and justified the need for getting vaccinated.
“Compensate all the victims of Covid vaccines including their family members through a mechanism that involves vaccine manufacturers as well,” a family member of a vaccine victim said.
The group also alleged that the current adverse event following immunisation (AEFI) system is severely flawed.
It sought to implement active surveillance and monitoring mechanisms besides reviewing the science behind all Covid vaccines and auditing their commercialisation.
Renowned interventional cardiologist Dr Deepak Natarajan said, “The last five years have tragically taught us that the ‘safe and effective’ vaccines were actually unsafe and ineffective.” Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan said, “The government hasn’t implemented the Supreme Court judgement in spirit in Jacob Puliyel case when it mandated an accessible virtual platform where the vaccine recipients can themselves register their adverse events and these reports were supposed to be publicly accessible.
“What instead was delivered was a sham of a website which just had a form to record adverse events without any status updates back to the registering person,” he said.
Epidemiologist Dr. Amitav Banerjee alleged that mass vaccination by coercion, particularly among the young who were at negligible risk from the virus, and at some risk from the vaccine defied logic, science, health economics and violated human rights. PTI PLB RHL
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