Claim about vaccine deaths wasn’t ‘discussed in House of Commons’

A post on Facebook shows a screenshot of a Google search partially displaying a result from the parliamentary website which appears to state “the daily rate of vaccine deaths is now higher than Covid deaths”. The accompanying caption claims: “Whilst you’re distracted with Strep, this has been discussed in the House of Commons.”

The visible text of the top Google search result says: “The daily rate of vaccine deaths is now higher than Covid deaths. Death figures in the UK for the two main vaccines at the links below are 1227 plus 129 miscarriages, the latter showing a steep rise.” 

While these lines do come from a document published on the Parliament website, this doesn’t mean this claim has been made in the House of Commons, or that it is true. 

The document referred to is actually a piece of written evidence submitted to a select committee by a member of the public and published in June 2021. 

Anyone can submit to select committees that are asking for written evidence. The fact that this written evidence was published on the parliamentary website doesn’t mean that it has been discussed in the House of Commons, or is endorsed by any members of the select committee concerned or MPs. 

There are no results for the claim made in the written evidence in Hansard, which officially records everything said in the House of Commons and House of Lords. 

The claim that the “daily rate of vaccine deaths is now higher than Covid deaths” is based on Yellow Card reports of suspected adverse reactions to Covid-19 vaccines. As we have written many, many times before, Yellow Card reports can be submitted by anyone and no proof of causation is required. 

This means that if someone dies shortly after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine, this death can be reported to the Yellow Card system even if there’s no proof the death was caused by a Covid-19 vaccine. 

As we’ve written before, Covid-19 vaccines have been listed as the underlying cause of death for some people, though we don’t have a breakdown of which vaccines were involved. 

According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 50 such deaths in England and one in Wales up to November 2022. In Scotland there have been nine in the period up to 15 December. There has been at least one registered death in Northern Ireland up to the end of September 2022. 

It is possible that the UK total of 61 may rise, if there’s been a delay in registering some deaths due to the vaccines. To date, more than 177,000 people have died in the UK with Covid-19 itself on their death certificate. 

The safety of Covid-19 vaccines has been raised in Parliament by MPs previously, and Full Fact has checked some of these debates.