FOI REF: FOI/2023/4877
You asked
It seems to me it would be easy to get an idea about the safety of the vaccine. There are millions of people who have never had a vaccine. The excess deaths among this group should be compared (by age) against those who have been vaccinated (a vaccinated person defined simply as someone who has had one or more vaccines). Why is nobody doing this?
We said
Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration.
We publish deaths involving COVID-19 or all cause deaths after receipt of the COVID-19 vaccination. We hold the following analysis, Deaths by vaccination status, England, which is an analysis of deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status that occurred between 1 April 2021 and 31 December 2022 in England.
This publication includes weekly age standardised mortality rates for deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status and a detailed analysis of deaths involving COVID-19 which occurred in fully vaccinated individuals. This dataset was produced through complex linking of census data to vaccination data held by NHS. A breakdown by vaccination status for deaths involving COVID-19 is available in table 1.
Mortality figures for non-COVID-19 deaths is available in table 2.
The data are not as a measure of vaccine effectiveness as many other factors can affect mortality rates.
Excess deaths by vaccination status
To calculate excess deaths in a particular year, the data from that year must be compared to the 5-year average. As the first vaccination was administered on 8 December 2020, we do not hold 5 years-worth of information to compare to 2022 deaths by vaccination status data to provide an 'excess deaths' figure. Therefore, we do not hold information showing excess deaths by vaccination status.
The Deaths in Vaccination Status publication provides information from 1 January 2021 to May 2022. If you wish to make comparisons between the deaths of those who have and haven't received the COVID-19 vaccination between 2021 and 2022, you can do so using the information in this publication. However, please note that we would not recommend this as a reliable method to calculate 'excess deaths', as averaging over five years removes the fluctuations seen year-on-year. Furthermore, vaccination rates between, for example, January 2021 and January 2022 would be very different.
If you would like to discuss this enquiry further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.