“There’s figures from the Office of National Statistics [sic] that say, what is it? You’re 32,000 times more likely to die if you’ve not been double jabbed from Covid.”
Speaking on the Jeremy Vine television programme, journalist and Daily Mail columnist Andrew Pierce claimed that figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that someone is “32,000 times more likely to die if you’ve not been double jabbed from Covid”.
However, this is incorrect. The figures actually show that in this report the risk of death was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than vaccinated people, not 32,000 times.
ONS data published in September shows that from 2 January to 24 September 2021, the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving Covid-19 was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals.
Age adjusted risk of death uses a statistical method to allow different groups (e.g vaccinated or unvaccinated) to be compared, and aims to reduce the impact of differences in age. This is important because age could otherwise be an important ‘confounding’ factor.
The ONS and the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) caution that these figures are not a measure of vaccine effectiveness, and can change over time due to changes in infection rates, Covid-19 variants, changes to the types of people who are vaccinated or unvaccinated (for example which populations are included at times of different rollouts), immunity via infection and waning vaccine immunity.
The Jeremy Vine show has since tweeted to say that Mr Pierce’s comment was incorrect and said: “The figures should state that the Covid death risk is 32 times higher for an unvaccinated person”.
However, a video clip of Mr Pierce making the claim posted by the show’s Twitter account, which has been viewed over 180 thousand times, remains online at the time of publishing.
We contacted Mr Pierce, who acknowledged that he had made a mistake, and apologised for the error.
Since this fact check was first published the OSR has written to the ONS and said that focusing just on the headline figure of ‘32 times’ without the other caveats included in the ONS report is "unhelpful". In response the ONS told Full Fact that: “We welcome recognition from the OSR that our team has a good understanding of the issues and will be updating our ongoing analysis using internationally recognised age-standardised mortality rates planned for this month. [...] We have made it clear throughout that these data are not to be taken as a measure of vaccine effectiveness.”