Misleading: 1 in every 246 Vaccinated People has died within 60 days of Covid-19 Vaccination in England according to UK Government.

Context

An article by The Exposé claims that 1 in 246 people vaccinated against COVID-19 die within 60 days of taking the vaccine. This statistic is supposedly based on data from an Office of National Statistics report on 'Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status'. The article claims that from this data, between January 1 and and the May 31, 2022, a total of 180,659 people died within 60 days of taking the COVID-19 vaccine. The article makes further claims that deaths among vaccinated populations are higher than the unvaccinated, implying that vaccines caused these deaths.

In Fact

The ONS did publish a report in July 2022 that listed the number of deaths in the population by COVID-19 vaccination status. It lists deaths both caused by COVID-19 and from non-COVID-19 causes and breaks them down by a variety of metrics from age to how many deaths occurred each week after vaccination. However, The Exposé misrepresents this data and claims that vaccination caused these deaths. The data do not and cannot be used to support this claim. The ONS data reports explicitly instruct readers that their data cannot be used to draw conclusions about vaccine efficacy or mortality or side effects. 

The Exposé does not address that the majority of deaths within 60 days are from vulnerable demographics, as the ONS report lists the highest mortality rates as between 60 - 90+ years old. A note within the data from the ONS, listed as note 9, states to be cautious when analyzing the data as vaccines were prioritized to be given to clinically vulnerable people, meaning many of those in the vaccination groups vary drastically in their health. This means that older and clinically vulnerable people were much more likely to have been vaccinated earlier than other people, and represent a larger portion of vaccinated individuals. 

To understand the impact of age on COVID-19 mortality rates, Logically spoke to Dr. Charlotte Bermingham, an ONS data scientist responsible for compiling the report. While comparing mortality data by vaccination statuses, "age must be taken into account." She further explained, "when age is taken into account, the mortality rates are consistently lower for people who have had two vaccinations compared to unvaccinated, as shown by our published data."

Another key piece of omitted information is that the highest spikes in death occur 12+ weeks after vaccination, with every age demographic having the highest reported number of deaths within this period and higher than any of the other weeks past vaccination. This number is strikingly higher than other weeks combined for each age demographic, indicating that the death rate is still higher further away from the vaccination date. Therefore, the data does not support the idea that vaccines are causing deaths immediately upon injection, and it is misrepresented to appear that this is the case. 

A previous article by Logically discussed this misrepresentation from The Expose, and how they have cherry-picked ONS data to make unsubstantiated claims. The Expose and other pushers of medical misinformation create correlations and then assume causation, despite the data being unassessed and in a raw format thus unable to support these conclusions. This can be seen in previous claims by the Exposé where they present the number of deaths within 60 days of vaccination and claim vaccines are the cause of death, but don't present the other information within the data that doesn't support their implication. 

The Verdict

It is the case that the ONS released a report on deaths and Covid vaccination status. It is also true that between January 1, 2021 and May 31, 2022, in 60 days following vaccination, roughly 180,659 people died total. However, the Exposé misrepresents this data and omits key information to push anti-vax misinformation. The ONS data cannot be used to determine causality or vaccine efficacy. The data does not represent a correlation to taking the vaccine and death, as the majority of deaths are still reported 12 weeks and beyond of vaccination with the majority of deaths within 60 days of vaccination still within the vulnerable population. This combined with Exposé's known history of misrepresenting data and pushing misleading information highlights the way in which data is cherry-picked to support misrepresented claims. Therefore we have marked this claim as misleading.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a lot of potentially dangerous misinformation. For reliable advice on COVID-19, including symptoms, prevention, and available treatment, please refer to the World Health Organization or your national healthcare authority.