A Facebook post claims that deaths in care homes are up 81% since the Covid-19 vaccination rollout.
It’s correct that care home deaths are up since the vaccination rollout started, but it is wrong to suggest that these are deaths caused by the vaccine.
They are, largely, deaths due to the virus itself, and there have also been an increased number of deaths among unvaccinated age groups, due to the virus.
What has happened in care homes?
The vaccine rollout started on 8 December with care home residents and staff being prioritised.
In the week to 8 December, 2,171 deaths in care homes in England were notified to the Care Quality Commission. This rose as high as 3,746 in the week to 23 January, a 71% increase.
This doesn’t cover the deaths of all care home residents, just those who died in care homes as opposed to in hospital or elsewhere.
We do have data on the number of deaths of all care home residents, but we can’t look at the precise week before the roll-out because this data is only published on a weekly basis. In the week to 11 December the deaths of 2,928 care home residents were registered in England and Wales, much the same as the week before, when 2,905 deaths were registered.
After the vaccine rollout, the number of deaths registered then fell in the last two weeks of the year (perhaps reflecting delays in registrations during the Christmas period, rather than an actual fall in deaths occurring) before shooting up in the first week of 2021.
We’re not sure how the author of this post calculated an 81% increase. The number of deaths among residents increased from 2,928 in the week to 11 December to 4,680 in the week to 22 January, the latest data available before the post was published. This is a 60% increase.
But the exact figure is sort of beside the point. Deaths among care home residents did not increase because of the vaccination programme, but because Covid itself spread widely in December and killed far more people.
For example, of the 2,928 deaths in the week to 11 December, 734 involved Covid-19 and 2,194 didn’t. In the week to 22 January, of the 4,680 deaths registered, 2,364 involved Covid-19 and 2,316 didn’t.
The increase in deaths of care home residents is almost entirely the result of increased Covid-19 deaths.
Vaccine safety
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has been monitoring reports of adverse effects during the vaccine rollout and recently wrote that the data “shows that the safety of these vaccines remains as high as expected from the clinical trial data that supported the approvals.”
It notes that you would expect to see deaths anyway after vaccination, given the most vulnerable are being vaccinated as a priority, but that, on investigation, it did not appear vaccination played a role in any of the deaths reported as suspicious.
Another indication that the vaccination isn’t responsible for the increased number of care home deaths is that deaths also rose in other groups, who were much less likely to be vaccinated at the time.
As with care home residents, deaths among non-care home residents fell in the last few weeks of 2020, and then rose considerably.