The Leftist propaganda news portal The Wire has been asked to take down 14 of its articles against the Indian pharmaceutical companyBharat Biotech and the covid-19 vaccine it developed, Covaxin.
This order was passed in a court in Telengana, as per the legal portal Bar and Bench against the editor of The Wire Siddharth Vardarajan and others.
Bharat Biotech has filed a Rs 100 crore defamation suit against The Wire and 12 persons who are associated with it.
The company argued in the court that The Wire had published articles that contained false allegations against Bharat Biotech and COVAXIN. The company’s counsel Senior Advocate Vivek Reddy said that the portal published the reports with malicious intent to undermine the reputation of Bharat Biotech.
Reddy said in the court that Bharat Biotech had previously developed vaccines for Tuberculosis, Zika Rotavirus, Chikungunya and Typhoid and received national and global recognition and has now collaborated with leading Government of India institutions to develop the Covid-19 vaccine. The company said that The Wire published a series of articles making fake allegations on authorisation and approvals of Covaxin without checking the facts.
Other than The Wire, the other defendants named in the case are Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, MK Bhanu, Neeta Sanghi, Vasudevan Mukunth, Shobhan Saxena, Florencia Costa, Prem Anand Murugan, Banjot Kaur, Priyanka Pulla, Seraj Ali, and Jammi Nagaraj Rao.
Responding to the arguments, the court noted that even after the government had approved the vaccine, The Wire continued to publish reports against it. The court said that only the Covaxin has been approved for the age group 15 to 18, but the portal still published reports which can lead to vaccine hesitancy.
Therefore, the court ordered The Wire to remove the articles from their website within 48 hours, and also restrained them from publishing any defamatory articles targeting Bharat Biotech and Covaxin.
Last month, Bharat Biotech had fact-checked several media houses, including The Wire, for spreading lies against Covaxin. The company had refuted a Wire report published in December which had claimed that currently there is no data available on the immune response generated by Covaxin. Bharat Biotech had stated that the data on the immune response generated by Covaxin has been published in several reputed international peer-reviewed journals through 2020 and 2021.
