The UK Health Security Agency stands accused of a ‘cover up’ after it refused to publish data that may link the Covid jab to excess deaths. The public health watchdog argued that it could cause bereaved relatives “distress or anger” if such a link were to be discovered. The Telegraph has the story.

The public health watchdog has been accused of a ‘cover-up’ after refusing to publish data that could link the Covid vaccine to excess deaths.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) argued that releasing the data would lead to the “distress or anger” of bereaved relatives if a link were to be discovered.

Public health officials also argued that publishing the data risked damaging the well-being and mental health of the families and friends of people who died.

Last year, a cross-party group expressed alarm about “growing public and professional concerns” over the UK’s rates of excess deaths since 2020.

In a letter to UKHSA and Department for Health, the MPs and peers said that potentially critical data – which map the date of people’s Covid vaccine doses to the date of their deaths – had been released to pharmaceutical companies but not put into the public domain.

They argued 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”.

UsForThem, a campaign group, requested that UKHSA release the data under freedom of information laws. But the agency refused, making a number of different arguments including that publishing the data “could lead to misinformation” that would “have an adverse impact on vaccine uptake” in the public.

Read more: Government “Withholding Data That May Link Covid Jab to Excess Deaths”