Sunday, 29 January 2023 | PNS
The Toxic Vaccine by Soham Sonis is a medical thriller that explores the global situation during the Covid-19 pandemic. A mysterious vaccine is injected into a group of Mumbai children in a remote laboratory. The children were lured to participate in human trials of the vaccine in exchange for a sum of Rs 25,000 to be paid to their parents. Ruchi and Siddhant were two of such children selected for the trial. Ruchi’s parents died in the pandemic and Siddhant’s parents were construction workers. Due to the loss of their job, the sum of Rs 25,000 was alluring enough for Siddhant’s parents to send him for the trial. Once they were injected with the mysterious liquid, they undergo major changes.
Three years later, Dr Sahil Shrivastava, a physiotherapist comes to a tiny village called Mapgao to run an orthopaedic camp with his students. The village is nestled beside a vast lake. The lake holds an eerie past that the villagers know but are terrified to address. Many stories about the lake prohibited people from crossings the lake at night. There were many mysterious happenings around the lake that the people of the village were reluctant to talk about. Strange things start happening around Sahil which were beyond his imagination. When two of his students go missing, Sahil has to act. Can Sahil untangle the mystery that is engulfing the village? The Toxic Vaccine revolves around an alternate reality of the Covid-19 vaccine, a conspiracy brewing in the deep underbelly of human trials.
The plots are interesting with twists that fascinate the readers.
Soham Sonis lives in the vibrant city of Pune, India. He is a physiotherapy graduate with a PG in sports medicine. He loves football and has learned the ukulele just to impress his friends. He is the founder of an innovative technique to test muscle strength. Soham had always been interested in stories and science, which inspired him to write a medical thriller novel, The Toxic Vaccine. The story highlights the horrors that can happen if vaccine synthesis goes wrong.
A vaccine is supposed to save lives, but in this story, a vaccine turns toxic. Soham was homeschooled after sixth grade. This experience taught him that doing things differently was completely fine. He also loves genetics and the biomechanics of the human body. He believes that humans are made of nothing but microbes, governing a physical being. Thus, this makes all of our surrogates of the microbial universe. The Toxic Vaccine is his debut novel.
