What was claimed
Children are dying on a large scale due to the Covid-19 vaccines.
Our verdict
This is not true. Very few children, if any, have died as a result of Covid vaccination in the UK.
Covid-19 vaccines not ‘Mass Genocide’ of children
29 August 2023
A Facebook post vastly overstates the harm caused by Covid-19 vaccines.
The post says “It is Mass Murder Worldwide with the vaccine roll out causing all the Adverse Reactions in Children whom are having Heart Attacks from these vaccines which also causes Myocarditis and so on [sic]”.
We cannot find reliable global data on the number of children who have died as a result of a Covid vaccination, but data from the UK shows the chance of a child dying from a Covid vaccination is extremely low.
False information about vaccines can cause harm when people make decisions based on it. We have written extensively about Covid vaccine misinformation.
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Reality of child Covid vaccine deaths
As we have written before, a very small number of children have sadly died after vaccination against Covid—indeed we can’t be certain that anyone aged under 18 has died in this way so far in the UK.
The latest data for England and Wales runs up to July 2023. It shows that one person under the age of 20 years old has died with “Covid-19 vaccines causing adverse effects in therapeutic use” as the underlying cause on their death certificate. 64 people of all ages have any mention of this on their death certificate.
There is a chance that one Covid vaccine death reported in Northern Ireland may have been a child, but we can’t be sure because it has only been recorded in the published data as a person aged between 15 and 34 years old. One death was registered in Northern Ireland in the first quarter of 2021, but it involved someone aged 90 or older, and another earlier this year aged 65-74.
In Scotland, nine people have died with the vaccine as the underlying cause of death and a further four have it mentioned on their death certificate. This data has not been updated since February, as far as we can tell, and we cannot find data showing a breakdown by age. At least one of the people was reportedly an adult.
Over 13.5 billion doses of the Covid vaccines have been given globally, 151 million of them in the UK. Children in the UK have generally lower uptake of the vaccine than older people, but a majority of older children have had at least one dose.
Children in clinical risk groups or older children who live with someone who is immunosuppressed are eligible for the autumn booster.
Featured image courtesy of the CDC
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because only a tiny number of children, if any, have died as a result of the Covid-19 vaccines.