The Supreme Court on Wednesday received a PIL seeking the appointment of an expert panel to examine the side effects of Covishield and the establishment of a government payment system to compensate families that have suffered the rare side effects of the vaccine.

The petition filed by advocate Vishal Tiwari has cited documents reportedly submitted by the pharma giant AstraZeneca in a UK court that purportedly admitted that some recipients of the vaccine had developed low platelet counts and blood clots as side effects. The petition has pleaded that an expert panel in India was needed given that millions of Indians were also administered the Covishield vaccine during the pandemic period and there have been instances of people dying from suspected adverse effects of the vaccine.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine formula was licensed to the Pune-based vaccine maker Serum Institute of India (SII) during the pandemic for the manufacture of Covishield. More than 175 crore doses of Covishield have been administered in India, Tiwari said.

The petitioner, citing a media report in the UK-based The Telegraph, said AstraZeneca had admitted in court documents that its vaccine against Covid-19 can cause a rare side effect. AstraZeneca has accepted the link between the vaccine and a rare medical condition called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) marked by low platelet levels and blood clots.

The petitioner said a case was lodged in the UK last year by Jamie Scott, a father of two, who was left with a permanent brain injury after developing a blood clot and bleed in the brain that has prevented him from working after he received the vaccine in April 2021.

The report said that in all “fifty-one cases have been lodged in the high court (in the UK), with victims and grieving relatives seeking damages estimated to be worth up to £100 million”.

The petitioner has sought the Supreme Court’s intervention to direct the Centre to constitute a medical panel comprising experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, and supervised by a retired Supreme Court judge to examine the side effects of Covishield.

The petition also wants the Union government to establish a “vaccine damage payment system” for citizens disabled by the Covid vaccines on the lines of similar compensation mechanisms in other countries such as the UK. It has sought compensation to be paid to those severely disabled and to families of those who died because of the side effects of the vaccine.

In court documents from February, AstraZeneca denied that “TTS is caused by the vaccine at a generic level”. However, it admitted to the possibility of TTS as a result of its vaccination in “very rare cases”, the petitioner stated.

TTS may manifest through a range of symptoms including breathlessness, pain in the chest or limbs, pinhead-size red spots or bruising of the skin in an area beyond the injection site, headaches, and numbness in body parts.

Millions of Indians opted to receive Covishield during the Covid-19 pandemic under repeated assertions and assurances from public health officials and Indian government agencies that the vaccine’s benefits outweighed any risks or rare side effects.

“The benefits of the vaccines were considered far greater than any risk,” said Chandrakant Lahariya, a consultant physician, epidemiologist, and vaccines specialist. “Against that backdrop, the reports of blood clots as rare adverse events are not anything new. This is something that has been known to the scientific and vaccine community throughout the last three years,” Lahariya told The Telegraph on Wednesday.

Lahariya also said there is no cause now for worry among vaccine recipients. “Any adverse event after vaccination, common or rare, happens within a few minutes to a few days or weeks after the vaccination. Therefore there is no reason to worry for any individual.”

The World Health Organisation had in April 2021 flagged reports of TTS as a rare adverse event with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Doctors in India had by October 2021 documented a few cases of the rare but potentially life-threatening blood clotting disorder among Covishield recipients in the country through what they described as a “gold-standard” test.

Doctors in the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Delhi, had diagnosed the clotting disorder in an 18-year-old boy from Mathura. Between June and October 2021, the Ganga Ram doctors had documented six more cases, five from Kerala and one from Delhi. All six patients survived after appropriate and timely treatment.