Coronavirus and vaccination rates in people aged 40 to 64 years by occupation, England: 8 December 2020 to 12 December 2021

• The occupations that had the highest coverage for third dose and booster vaccinations were related to health care and services; 75.3% of health professionals and 58.7% of health and social care associate professionals had received three vaccinations. 

• The occupations with the lowest coverage for third dose and booster vaccinations were elementary trades and related occupations (37.0%) and skilled construction and building trades (39.8%); these occupations also had the highest proportion of people that had not received a vaccination at 14.5% and 12.0% respectively.

We linked vaccination data from the National Immunisation Management System (NIMS) to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Public Health Data Asset (PHDA) based on NHS number. The ONS PHDA is a unique linked dataset combining the 2011 Census, the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) data for pandemic planning and research, and the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).

The study population consisted of people aged 40 to 64 years, alive on 12 December 2021 who were resident in England, registered with a general practitioner (GP) in 2019, and enumerated at the 2011 Census.

These data only include third dose and booster vaccinations that were received from 16 September 2021 onwards. Individuals who received a third dose or booster vaccination prior to this date were excluded from the analysis.

Occupation was derived from the 2011 Census and was classified according to the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2010. As this occupation information was collected in 2011, it is likely to be misclassified for a proportion of people, because they have left the labour force or changed occupation since 2011. To mitigate measurement error, we restricted our analysis to people aged 40 to 64 years, who are likely to have relatively higher occupational stability.

These data only contain information on people who were enumerated in the 2011 Census, and therefore exclude residents who did not take part in that census, and people who have immigrated since 2011. It also excludes those not registered with a GP in 2019.

The NIMS data covered the period 8 December 2020 to 12 December 2021. However, there may be an additional lag in data reporting such that it is possible we have not captured all COVID-19 vaccinations that were received by 12 December 2021.