Health Secretary urged to release data that ‘may link Covid vaccine to excess deaths’

Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, has been criticised over what the MPs and peers called a wall of silence – HEATHCLIFF O’MALLEY FOR THE TELEGRAPH

MPs and peers have accused the Health Secretary of withholding data that could link the Covid vaccine to excess deaths, and criticised a “wall of silence” on the topic.

A cross-party group has written to Victoria Atkins to sound alarm about the “growing public and professional concerns” at the UK’s rates of excess deaths since 2020.

Ministers have blamed the rise in excess deaths on record NHS waiting lists and the pandemic backlog.

But the parliamentarians are demanding to be shown the underlying data to support the Government’s assertion that there is “no evidence” linking excess deaths to the vaccines for Covid-19.

“If those data do indeed exist, please share them; if thorough investigations have already ruled out such a link, please share the relevant reports,” their letter says. “There is no place here for blind faith.”

The group of 21 MPs and peers from four parties have written to the Health Secretary and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), as well as the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to request the data.

They believe potentially critical data – which maps the date of people’s Covid vaccine doses to the date of their deaths – have been released to pharmaceutical companies but not put into the public domain.

The MPs argue that the data should be released “on the same anonymised basis that it was shared with the pharmaceutical groups, and there seems to be no credible reason why that should not be done immediately”.

They add: “We warn that by withholding official data which could help reassure the public, the DHSC, the UKHSA and the MHRA are now fuelling concerns and hesitancy about public health messaging. Questions about these trends, however, have to date been met by a relative wall of silence from your organisations and other public health officials.”

The letter was organised by the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on pandemic response and recovery and the campaign group UsForThem.

Its signatories include the Conservative MPs Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger, Philip Davies and Karl McCartney, as well as the Labour MP Graham Stringer, who sits on the science, innovation and technology committee.

The leader of Reform UK has committed his party to a public inquiry into excess deaths and alleged Covid vaccine harms. Richard Tice said there was a “serious problem” with thousands more people dying than expected and suggested the side-effects of coronavirus jabs could be responsible.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been accused of overestimating excess deaths in the first year of the Covid pandemic.

The statistics body announced last week that it was updating its methodology for calculating excess deaths to include current death rates, as well as the growing and ageing population – a change that many experts said was “long overdue”.

But academics from the University of Oxford warned the new modelling revealed a major drop in expected deaths in 2020, making it appear that far more people had died than normal during the first year of the pandemic.

A DHSC spokesman said: “We are committed to data transparency and publish a wide range of data on excess mortality. The datasets published are kept under constant review.

“A wide variety of factors can contribute to excess mortality each year and we work closely with the MHRA and UKHSA to analyse significant trends and adjust public health interventions where appropriate.”

The UKHSA and MHRA were approached for comment.

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