Vaccine Priorities

Bulletin 87 | Yifei Gong and Stuart McDonald

Nine groups in the UK have been prioritised to be vaccinated in the first phase. In this bulletin, we consider the logic of the vaccine priority order. We examine deaths to date in each group where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.

We find that the nine priority groups, which comprise less than half the UK population, make up 99% of the observed COVID deaths. Vaccine priority groups 1-4 cover 88% of the deaths. The top two priority groups alone cover two-thirds of the deaths.

For each group, we estimate the number of vaccinations required to prevent one COVID death. This increases rapidly as we move down the priority order.

Our simple analysis lends strong support to the vaccine priority order determined. It should not however be interpreted as suggesting that the lower risk groups do not need vaccination.