FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4254
You asked
For England and Wales can you tell me (including up to date coroners' reports), for all of the time available from the pandemic onset, how many people under 40 years of age have died as a result of COVID-19 without any other factors?
How many people under the age of 40 have died as a direct result of a COVID-19 vaccine side effect?
How many people under 30 years of age have died as a result of COVID-19 without any other factors?
How many people under the age of 30 have died as a direct result of a COVID-19 vaccine side effect?
How many people under 20 years of age have died as a result of COVID-19 without any other factors?
How many people under the age of 20 have died as a direct result of a COVID-19 vaccine side effect?
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
COVID-19 deaths with no underlying conditions
Health conditions are recorded on the death certificate only if the certifying doctor or coroner believed they made some contribution to the death, direct or indirect. The death certificate does not include all health conditions from which the deceased might have suffered if they were not considered relevant.
The death certificate (Annex A (PDF, 224KB)) used in England and Wales is compatible with that recommended by WHO. It is set out in two parts. Part I gives the condition or sequence of conditions leading directly to death, while Part II gives details of any associated conditions that contributed to the death but are not part of the causal sequence.
We recommend using our pre-existing conditions methodology to answer this question as it removes any conditions caused by the underlying cause of death.
We define pre-existing conditions as those mentioned in Part 2 of the medical certificate of cause of death. If COVID-19 is mentioned in Part 1 on lines above other conditions also mentioned in Part 1, the last condition mentioned in Part 1 is also considered a pre-existing condition. We don't know exactly how many people who died from COVID-19 had no pre-existing health conditions, only how many did not have a pre-existing condition mentioned on the death certificate. A contributor to the cause of death is expected to have increased the likelihood of death, but this does not mean that the death would have been avoided in its absence.
We would also recommend reading our recent blog on this subject: To say only 17,000 people have died from COVID-19 is highly misleading.
We hold analysis showing deaths due to COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions by broad age-band in England and Wales in the following publication: Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales. This is published quarterly within the Monthly Mortality Analysis publication:
The next release is scheduled for publication on 25 July 2022.
Within the publication, we have published a breakdown by broad age group of 0 to 64 years and 65 years and over.
If you would like to obtain further breakdowns of this data, we can create a custom output. Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate). Such enquiries can be made to the HALE Customer services team on Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.
Deaths due to adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccination
Please see the following publication: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. Table 13 of this publication provides number of deaths involving COVID-19 vaccines causing adverse effects in therapeutic use by age group for deaths registered in March 2020 to May 2022.
Data for June will be published on 25 July 2022. As such, this information is considered exempt under Section 22(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, whereby information is exempt from release if there is a view to publish the information in the future. Furthermore, as a central government department and producer of official statistics, we need to have the freedom to be able to determine our own publication timetables. This is to allow us to deal with the necessary preparation, administration and context of publications. It would be unreasonable to consider disclosure when to do so would undermine our functions.
This exemption is subject to a public interest test. We recognise the desirability of information being freely available and this is considered by ONS when publication schedules are set in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics. The need for timely data must be balanced against the practicalities of applying statistical skill and judgement to produce the high quality, assured data needed to inform decision-making. If this balance is incorrectly applied, then we run the risk of decisions being based on inaccurate data which is arguably not in the public interest. This will have an impact on public trust in official statistics in a time when accuracy of official statistics is more important to the public than ever before.