A court in Telangana has ordered leftist propaganda portal The Wire to take down as many as 14 articles it had published against Indian pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech and the Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin developed by it. The order was passed after Bharat Biotech had filed an Rs100 crore defamation suit against The Wire and 12 persons associated with it.
According to a report by legal portal Bar & Bench, the court has also ordered The Wire, its editor Siddharth Vardarajan and the others named in the suit from publishing any defamatory articles relating to Bharat Biotech.
[BREAKING] In a 100 CRORE defamation case filed by BHARAT BIOTECH, Andhra Court ordered taking down of 14 articles on @thewire_in and restrained
— Bar & Bench (@barandbench) February 23, 2022
1)THE WIRE
2) Siddharth Vardarajan
3) SR Bhatia
4) M.K. Venu &others
From publishing DEFAMATORY articles relating to @BharatBiotech pic.twitter.com/S5NL8E34XL
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.
Responding to the report, Siddharth Varadarajan alleged that a local Andhra Pradesh court has ordered to take down the 14 articles without serving any notice on the portal. Calling the propaganda articles ‘deeply reported’, he claimed that no change was given to them to refute the ‘false claims’ made by Bharat Biotech.
So 14 deeply reported #Covaxin stories— published over a year—ordered to be taken down by a local AP court with no notice served on @TheWire_in, no chance given for us to refute whatever false claims @BharatBiotech has made against us!
— Siddharth (@svaradarajan) February 23, 2022
Let me say this—BB’s bullying will not work https://t.co/Kcd8f8hn3V
Ever since Indian pharmaceutical majors like Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India successfully developed and manufactured vaccines against Covid-19, left liberals have launched a sustained attack on them. They have been advocating for supposedly ‘superior’ vaccines made by American pharma giant Pfizer, and have been spreading vaccine-hesitancy by publishing fake reports on made in India vaccines.
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.
