Twenty-year-old Coimbatore-based Karunya Venugopalan got her first jab on June 8. Less than 10 days later, she developed mild difficulties, which in a day turned serious. After nearly four weeks of hospitalisation with her doctors struggling to find the cause and cure for her ailments, on July 10, Karunya passed away. She was diagnosed with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in adults (MIS-A), says her father Venugopalan Govindan to us over the telephone, pointing out that they couldn’t attribute a cause to it. While MIS-A is commonly associated with COVID-19, Karunya had been tested twice, both results being negative. “I know for a fact that it is the vaccine that caused this,” alleges her father who has  contacted other families who have lost their children to the COVID vaccine and are keen now to spread awareness  among people.

It is the lack of clarity on the composition of these vaccines that have resulted in such tragic outcomes, believes Govindan. While the Adverse Effects Following Immunisation (AEFI) review committee has dismissed these cases as coincidental, there is also no Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database in India unlike other countries, where data is available to the public. Even to register an AEFI case is not easy in India, he says. Once registered, it is difficult to learn of the status and it takes months for vaccine death investigation results to come out.