Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan’s ‘vaccine sceptic’ views spark row

Tribune Web Desk
Chandigarh, June 28

Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan vaccine sceptic views have drawn criticism on Twitter—a development that comes at a time when India’s trying to scale up vaccination drive in an attempt to help slow the spread of Covid-19.

Bhushan, who has been, and remains, one of the most vocal critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP-led central government, sparked a row on Twitter when he said it was irresponsible to promote universal usage of a vaccine that was still untested. Bhushan, who’s voiced his skepticism over vaccines on social media before, shared a news article about a man who lost his wife to what he claims were the adverse effects of the Covid vaccine. In his post, he accused the central government of not monitoring adverse events from the vaccine.

Along with the news article, Bhushan wrote the words: “The govt is not monitoring adverse events from vaccine nor releasing data.”

In a second post, Bhushan clarified that he wasn’t “anti-vaccine per se” but was opposed to universal usage of “untested vaccines”.

“A lot of people including friends & family have accused me of promoting Vaccine hesitancy, let me clarify my position. I am not anti Vaccine per se. But I believe it is irresponsible to promote universal vaccination of experimental & untested vaccines esp to young & Covid recovered,” his post read.

A second one only seconds later—this one flagged as misleading by Twitter—said: “The healthy young have hardly any chance of serious effects or dying due to covid. They have a higher chance of dying due to vaccines. The covid recovered have much better natural immunity, than the vaccine gives them. Vaccines may even compromise their acquired natural immunity”.

“For the record, I have not taken, nor do I intend to take any Covid Vaccine,” he said in his post.

Backlash from these posts prompted another one hours later, this one saying he was “shocked” at the attack on what he said were his “contrarian views”.  

“I have been attacked by many for tweeting about my views on Covid vaccines. The piece below summarises my Vaccine skepticism & the reasons for this. Apart from the vaccines being untested & having serious adverse effects, I am shocked by attempts to censor such contrarian views,” he said.