Deaths involving the COVID-19 vaccination

Dyddiad y datganiad:
1 October 2021

FOI Ref: FOI/2021/2954

You asked

Please supply a report of all deaths in the UK (or in any of England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland) within a set period of time of receiving a first or a second dose of any COVID-19 vaccines, attributed or not to any of these vaccines (deaths of all causes), between 8 December 2020 until the most recent possible date.

If possible, please supply the following breakdowns of the information:

By age
By sex
By first or second dose status
By exact number of days to death (or normalised, i.e. could be within 3 weeks/21 days, 4 weeks/28 days, 3 months/9 weeks/63 days)

We said

Thank you for your enquiry requesting deaths involving the COVID-19 vaccination.

We are responsible for the provision of mortality statistics for England and Wales. National Records Scotland (NRS) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Therefore, we do not hold the requested data for the whole of the UK. Should you wish to obtain this data from NRS and NISRA, they can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.

Deaths due to the COVID-19 vaccination in England and Wales:

The number of deaths in England and Wales where adverse reaction to the vaccine was mentioned on the death certificate can be found in Table 12 of our Monthly Mortality Analysis dataset. There are currently 4 deaths registered with the aligning ICD-10 codes for this (U12.9). We do not hold this data disaggregated by brand of vaccination. The latest data available is August 2021.

Further breakdowns of this data would produce very low numbers, which would constitute personally identifiable information. Therefore, we would be unable to disclose this information in response to your request. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it a criminal offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify individuals. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individual businesses or persons can be identified, we find that Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.

Deaths involving COVID-19 and deaths from all cause by vaccination status:

We hold analysis showing deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status that occurred between 1 January and 2 July 2021 in England in the following publication: Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England: deaths occurring between 2 January and 2 July 2021.

The data are for England only, as vaccinations data for Wales is not yet available to be linked to the mortality dataset and the Public Health Data Asset covers England only. Therefore, we consider data for Wales as information not held.

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.

Table 1 shows count of deaths involving COVID-19 and percentage of all deaths by vaccination status, England, deaths occurring between 2 January and 2 July 2021
Vaccination status	Deaths involving COVID-19	Non-COVID-19 deaths	Percent of all deaths
All deaths regardless of vaccination status	51,281	214,701	19.3
Unvaccinated	38,964	65,170	37.4
Deaths within 21 days of first dose	4,388	14,265	23.5
Deaths 21 days or more after first dose	7,289	66,533	9.9
Deaths within 21 days of second dose	182	11,470	1.6
Deaths 21 days or more after second dose	458	57,263	0.8

Download this table Table 1 shows count of deaths involving COVID-19 and percentage of all deaths by vaccination status, England, deaths occurring between 2 January and 2 July 2021

.xls .csv

We also hold analysis of the ages of the 256 Breakthrough deaths, in tables 1 and 2 of the publication. "Breakthrough cases" are where infection has occurred in someone who is fully vaccinated.

We define a "breakthrough death" as a death involving coronavirus (COVID-19) that occurred in someone who had received both vaccine doses and had a first positive PCR test at least 14 days after the second vaccination dose.

Age group and number of deaths for breakthrough deaths
Age group	Number of deaths
0-64	14
65-74	25
75-84	90
85+	127

Download this table Age group and number of deaths for breakthrough deaths

.xls .csv

We do not hold this analysis broken down any further by by vaccination status, age and sex. This would need to be created and public authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.

However, please note we are planning a future publication as we obtain more data. The publication date will be announced on our Release Calendar.

You may also be interested in Public Health England's weekly surveillance report, which looks at the impact on hospitalisations, infection, vaccine effectiveness and mortality.

If you have any further enquiries about your request, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.

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