An Indian couple who lost their daughter allegedly after getting vaccinated with Covishield is planning to sue the world's largest vaccine maker as well as the British pharma giant that developed it during the Covid-19 pandemic. The development comes after AstraZeneca admitted in a UK court that its vaccine can cause rare side effects, which may lead to blood clots and a low platelet count.
The AstraZeneca vaccine was manufactured in India by the Serum Institute of India (SII) under the 'Covishield' label and was widely administered here.
Venugopalan Govindan, who lost his 20-year-old daughter, Karunya, in 2021 said AstraZeneca's admission was "too late" and came after "so many lives have been lost".
In a post on X (formally Twitter), he said the SII should have stopped the vaccine supply after the 15 European countries had restricted its usage over deaths from blood clots that happened in March 2021. He said the grieving parents are fighting for justice in various courts, but are not getting a hearing.
"The manufacturer Serum Institute of India, the government who advertised these vaccines throughout the nation at huge expense to exchequer as 'safe and effective' without sufficient data (and when data emerged about the adverse events from around the world, they chose not to stop the rollout or at least sensitise people and medical fraternity about it), the regulatory bodies that approved it and subsequently didn't intervene to stop it when data emerged about the dangers, are all culpable in the death of my daughter and countless others who have died after taking this so called vaccine," read his post.
"If sufficient remedies aren't obtained, for the sake of justice and to prevent recurrence of this atrocity that was perpetrated in the name of public health, we will file fresh cases against all of those perpetrators because of whose actions the deaths of our children ensued. Eight of the victims' families have connected and I am echoing the common sentiments of all of us," he said.
Rachana Gangu, who lost her daughter Rithaika in 2021, and Govindan filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court seeking the appointment of a medical board to probe the deaths of their daughters and prepare a protocol for the early detection of the impact of vaccinations, besides compensation.
AstraZeneca is already facing a class action lawsuit in the UK over claims in at least 51 cases that its vaccine caused deaths and severe injuries in several cases. It had recently admitted that its vaccine can cause "in very rare cases, cause TTS".
Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS) is a rare condition in which blood clots form in unusual places in the body, and the number of platelets in the blood drops. Platelets are small cells that help blood to clot, so having too few of them can be dangerous.
The condition was observed in people who received adenoviral vector COVID-19 vaccines, such as Vaxzevria, Covishield (AstraZeneca) and the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine. TTS seems to occur because the body's immune system reacts to the vaccine by making antibodies that attack a protein involved in blood clotting.