Multiple families on Tuesday demanded that the government fully disclose information and provide compensation to alleged Covid-19 vaccine “victims”, citing instances of fatal adverse events and accusing government officials of staying silent about serious risks linked to a key vaccine.

The families, who have petitioned various courts, have accused the Centre of disregarding a rare, life-threatening vaccine-induced blood clotting disorder in recipients of Covishield and using top health officials and government doctors to assert that Covid-19 jabs were 100 per cent safe.

Covishield — developed by the UK-based AstraZeneca — was produced in India by the Pune-based private vaccine maker Serum Institute of India. Several countries, including Austria, Denmark and Norway had withdrawn the AstraZeneca vaccine in 2021 amid signals of the clotting disorder.

Doctors at the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi, had by October 2021 also diagnosed seven cases of the clotting disorder called vaccine-induced thrombosis and thrombocytopenia (VITT) and underlined the need to raise nationwide awareness and guidelines for early diagnosis and treatment.

“But nothing happened,” said Venugopalan Govindan, a Coimbatore resident and one of the petitioners who lost his 20-year-old daughter about a month after she had received Covishield in June 2021. “Had the government at least alerted the medical community nationwide about the critical need to look out for this disorder among those vaccinated, it is possible some could have been saved.”

Sections of public health experts and the government’s vaccination advisers have argued since 2021 that the vaccination decision had taken into account the potential risks and determined that the inoculation programme would vastly outweigh any risks.

Venugopalan’s petition in the Supreme Court, filed in October 2021, is scheduled to come up for its next hearing on November 26. Venugopalan said the various petitions have sought a “revamp” of the government’s mechanisms for monitoring adverse events following vaccination (AEFIs), saying the existing mechanisms are “severely flawed and exist only to justify vaccination”. The petitions have urged the implementation of an “active” surveillance system that looks for adverse events in contrast to the existing system that documents them only if vaccine recipients report them as adverse events.

The families have also demanded that all high-ranking officials who had “lied, misguided and coerced the Indian population” on the Covid-19 vaccination should be “held accountable and punished”.

“We want the court to give the parents a fair hearing,” said Colin Gonsalves, a Supreme Court lawyer representing Venugopalan and others. “The government of India has for years been suppressing the connection between Covid-19 vaccines and deaths caused by it. The truth has to come out. We look forward now to the Supreme Court putting an end to this suppression and doing justice to the parents of the children who have died."

A doctor familiar with the VITT cases in India who requested not to be named told The Telegraph on Tuesday that when the cases had been brought to the notice of the government’s vaccination advisers, they had been underplayed as “only seven cases” in the country.

Prashant Bhushan, a Supreme Court lawyer familiar with the petitioners’ pleas, said the current AEFI mechanisms exist only to “hide the adverse events” and to give a clean chit to the vaccines. He said the country had millions of people who had either received or not received the Covid-19 vaccine and it should be possible to examine the incidence rates of various health disorders, including the clotting disorders, in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

“Unfortunately, authorities in India have not made efforts to examine this data,” he said.