Twitter flags Prashant Bhushan’s post on vaccines in India; 'I have been attacked,' he tweets

Activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan tweet on COVID-19 vaccines has been flagged by microblogging site Twitter. In a series of tweets Monday, Prashant Bhushan had questioned the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines available in India.

Dr N.K. Arora, member of the national COVID-19 task force, has also criticised Bhushan for his tweets at a time when the government is trying its best to address the issue of vaccine hesitancy.

Bhushan tweeted a news report about a 45-year-old woman who died 10 days after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and said, "The govt is not monitoring adverse events from vaccine nor releasing data."

When accused of “promoting vaccine hesitancy,” Bhushan tweeted, “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 next tweet was, “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.”

Bhushan also said he had not taken nor intends to take any vaccine.

Twitter was quick to add a disclaimer to the tweet, saying, “it is misleading.” The social media platform has also prevented any other user to share it unless it is quoted.

Soon after, Bhushan tweeted his four-page statement, where he said, “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.”

Dr N.K. Arora reacted to Bhushan’s tweets, saying the Centre has in place a national system to track instances of adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) which is currently operational in over 700 districts across India.

He added that the government had published the first post-COVID-19 vaccination death in the system. All adverse events are probed thoroughly as per the guidelines mentioned by World Health Organization’s algorithm.