Quick Take
A British media website has referred to the COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report week 11 released by the UK Health Security Agency to claim that Covid-19 deaths have doubled in the UK vaccinated population since the peak of the Omicron wave. We fact-checked and found the claim to be False.
The Claim
On March 17, 2022, the UK Health Security Agency published a report titled, “COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report Week 11”.
Referring to the report, a British media website named DailyExpose published an article titled, “UK Government data proves the Covid Vaccination Campaign is a disaster; the Fully Vaccinated now account for 92.2% of all Covid-19 Deaths in England”. This report claims, “Deaths among the vaccinated population in the past 4 weeks are double the number of deaths recorded among the vaccinated population throughout December at the height of the Omicron wave”.
Fact Check
What is COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report?
The COVID-19 vaccine surveillance is a weekly report released by the UK Health Security Agency to study vaccine effectiveness that can help analyse better the impact of Covid-19 vaccines in less than perfectly controlled conditions. The Healthy Indian Project (THIP) media has discussed in detail the importance of Covid-19 vaccine surveillance report.
The UKSHA Week 11 report states that ‘no vaccine is 100% effective’ and has explained the interpretation of its data on page number 39.
Does the report show deaths among vaccinated people have doubled since the peak of Omicron?
It does not seem so. The Gov.UK website shows Covid cases increased steadily throughout December 2021 and reached their peak on January 3. After which, the covid cases fell and did not show many changes through mid-January. The cases again fell in February.
The DailyExpose article made calculations by referring to the death recorded within sixty days of a positive Covid-19 positive result. The article compared UKSHA Week 1 2022 report with UKSHA Week 11 2022 report to show the spike in covid death cases.
It seems the increase in December is because the data had deaths recorded within sixty days of covid positive test and infections recorded at the Omicron peak. Other UKSHA reports have shown lower covid positive cases in February and March.
Comparing the UKSHA Week 11 and UKSHA Week 51 reports, we found a steady increase in the deaths among double or triple vaccinated people.
A better understanding of the UKSHA reports from the perspective of rate of infection, affected age groups, and impact of the vaccine on the population since September 2021 is required, when the booster shots were made available to people.
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