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Death by Vaccine

The central government told the Supreme Court recently that it can’t be held liable for the rare deaths caused by adverse effects of the Covid-19 vaccine. Two young women in Telangana and Tamil Nadu died after vaccination.

By Vikram Kilpady

The Bhagavad Gita’s most popular quote of Lord Krishna in Western imagination is: “Time, I am Death, the destroyer of the worlds”, immortalised by Robert Oppenheimer on imagining the annihilation that nuclear fission could turn out to be for human kind. In the last two years, it was Time again that brought into our consciousness the masking, the six-feet-distancing, the frantic cleaning, the rush for never-before-known drugs, making them popular items of trade on the black market, the shortage of oxygen as every breath for the Covid-hit threatened to be their last and final.

The disease claimed 5.31 lakh deaths in India. All through this, every time you made a phone call, Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone implored you to take every precaution against Covid and to go in for vaccination, when the vaccines came by. Very many Indians heeded the star’s reminder in a moment of pride that Covishield was being made in Pune by the Serum Institute and the Covaxin vaccine was being made indigenously by Bharat Biotech in Hyderabad. Some believed the vaccine was mandatory, some said it was voluntary; the enforcing authorities, meanwhile, maintained their insistence on seeing vaccination certificates that were being lampooned across the globe for other reasons.

Towards the end of November 2022, the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) told the Supreme Court that the central government was not liable to pay compensation for the deaths caused by Adverse Events Following Immunisation (AEFI), which, it said were in any case rare. “The vaccines in use under the vaccination programme are manufactured by third parties and have successfully undergone thorough regulatory review in India as well as other nations. In these facts, holding the State directly liable to provide compensation under the narrow scope of strict liability for extremely rare cases of death occurring due to Adverse Effects Following Immunisation from the use of vaccines may not be legally sustainable,” the affidavit stated.

The government’s point was a fine legal scalpel wielded over what remedies can be provided by way of compensation in a petition filed under either Article 32 or 226 of the Constitution. The petition filed by the parents of a 19-year-old woman and a 20-year-old woman of Telangana and Tamil Nadu, respectively, had sought an independent review of AEFI cases and said that there had not been informed consent on vaccination. The centre countered that such an independent review will plant a seed of doubt in the existing regulatory and AEFI-monitoring mechanism and would harm public interest, and that such a prayer should not be granted.

The government dodged the question of informed consent, saying since the vaccination was voluntary (and not mandatory), the concept of informed consent is not applicable in these cases. Therefore, the government did nothing wrong. For starters, it at least accepted that vaccination is voluntary, an idea alien to the grassroots-level machinery the State employs to interact with citizens. A few states had moved towards enforcing vaccine mandates, until the Supreme Court forced them to hit pause.

One of the petitioners, Rachana Gangu from Hyderabad, had written to Prime Minister Modi in July 2021 for better AEFI management and to address, in public interest, the lack of education as to the vaccination’s potential side effects. She noted that data from India and abroad had shown women under 50 had a higher risk of blood clots. Her 19-year-old daughter Rithaika Sri Omtri, “a healthy girl with no medical issues,” had taken the vaccine on May 29, 2021, and had developed Cerebral Venal Sinus Thrombosis, causing blood clots and brain haemorrhage. She died on June 19, 2021.

The petitioner got a terse reply on March 31, 2022. “The sad demise of your daughter is irreparable. However, with regard to the above grievance, it is informed that all minor, serious and severe Adverse Event Following Immunization (AEFI) following Covid-19 vaccinations are reported by vaccinators and district immunization officers through the Co-WIN portal. Serious and severe AEFIs (deaths, hospitalizations and cases occurring in clusters or which raise parental/community concern) are investigated. In death cases, all hospital records, past treatment records, post-mortem reports/verbal autopsy reports, etc. are collected. Causality assessment of all serious and severe cases are conducted at state and national levels.

“As we are aware that COVID Vaccination is voluntary. In case of any causality due to Covid vaccination, the Health Department or vaccine manufacturer shall not be hold (sic) responsible for any loss of life after vaccination. The Government of India has given clearance for administrating covid vaccines on the basis of review of available scientific evidences, global examples and the practices being followed in other countries implementing COVID-19 vaccination.”

The response was from a Deputy Secretary, Covid Vaccination. All’s well with governance. The second parent, G Venugopalan, who lost his 20-year-old daughter Karunya Venugopalan, wrote to the PM on the Public Grievances Portal (pg portal) in the second week of July 2021. The reply came via the Coimbatore Municipal Corporation in October 2021, saying the grievance is under review and the government of Tamil Nadu will look into it.

The MoHFW affidavit in the Supreme Court makes a distinction between the two cases. The Hyderabad death was identified as Thrombosis and Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS), a known side-effect documented to occur in 0.61 cases per million doses in India. In the UK, it was identified at four cases per million. The Coimbatore case was identified as Adverse Effect of Special Interest and ascribed to Multi System Inflammatory Syndrome of Children/Adults, with no definitive evidence globally to link it to Covid.
Like the response to the grievance made on pgportal, the MoHFW affidavit begins,

“At the outset, the answering Respondent offers deep and sincere condolences to the petitioners on the tragic and untimely demise of their respective daughters. It is most respectfully submitted that the Union of India is deeply sensitive to the concerns raised in the present petition and the issue of safety in Covid-19 vaccine administration is considered a matter of utmost importance.”

It also notes the petitioners’ grievances raised with the prime minister and notes the dates the responses were made, which are among the annexures. The very same affidavit in its conclusion charges the petitioners with failing to show how existing AEFI monitoring and investigating systems have proven to be inadequate. This is in response to the prayer for independent review of AEFI cases.

If one goes by the math in the Telangana case, AEFI cases are 0.61 cases per million doses in the country as per the MoHFW. Given that 1.744 billion doses have been administered, the figure for AEFI cases would be over 1,000 people. The figure looks minuscule, given the scale of the Indian populace. But expressing sorrow for the deaths while not making information on AEFIs part of popular discourse, like the now seemingly ironic Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme, also looks callous and criminal. Every citizen counts, no matter who they vote for.

The matter-of-factness which dismisses taking the vaccine as voluntary while egging everyone on to get jabbed is age-old governmental doublespeak. Vaccine cynics can find vindication in the dancing dervish-like affidavit which does everything: apologise for the deaths, defend the vaccine, indemnify its maker and the government’s regulatory mechanism, blame the parents for not reading up enough on the vaccine’s adverse effects and conclude that compensation cannot be given. And lo, we are only talking about one vaccine’s adverse effects.

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