How many people in England are unvaccinated?

23 Dec 2021 | Full Fact's weekly news

FACT CHECK
How many people in England are unvaccinated?

News blog The Exposé claimed that 23.5 million people in England are unvaccinated. This is based on flawed maths and is too high.

To calculate its figure, The Exposé multiplied its estimate of the population of England eligible for a vaccine (47.8 million) by the level of first dose vaccine coverage in England as of 12 December published by the UKHSA, which was 67.9%.

It concluded that 32.4 million people were vaccinated, leaving 15.3 million eligible people unvaccinated and 23.5 million in total who hadn’t received a vaccine dose.

But the UKHSA’s vaccine coverage figure didn’t refer to what proportion of eligible people had been vaccinated, but what proportion of the entire English population had been vaccinated, including those not eligible for vaccination.

As of 19 December 2021, 43,250,509 first doses have been given in England. To calculate how many people are unvaccinated, you can subtract this from the total number of people in England. The problem is there’s two quite different estimates of what this figure might be.

Depending on which population figure you use, the number of people unvaccinated in England could be 12.3 million or 19.5 million.

The two data sets

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FACT CHECK
Iain Duncan Smith’s figures on school absence are out of date

During an appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday, former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP said pupil absence had grown by 55% “during the previous lockdown”, adding that more than 90,000 pupils are now absent from school.

As he said during the interview the source of these figures is the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a think tank which is chaired by Sir Iain. The CSJ also later tweeted a clip of Sir Iain quoting these statistics, which he described as being “produced… the other day”, alongside a link to the report where they were first published.

However, these are not recent figures—in fact they describe pupil absence in Autumn 2020. There is no date on the CSJ page containing the figures on pupil absence, but Wayback Machine shows that a version of the page with the same statistics existed as far back as 28 June, 2021.

Crucially, these figures are more than a year out of date and subsequently can’t reliably tell us anything about current pupil absences.

Year-old statistics

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FACT CHECK
Brazil doesn’t produce 25% of the world’s food

In Parliament, Conservative MP and trade envoy to Brazil Marco Longhi claimed the South American country produces a quarter of the world’s food. This figure appears far too high. The most recent available data from the UN shows Brazil produced 10% of the world’s food by weight in 2019 and 4% by value in 2018—behind India and China in both cases.

It is possible that Mr Longhi was referring to a different set of data, but we have not found any reputable recent data which suggests Brazil’s food production is anywhere near this level.

A search on Google for the question “How much of the world's food does Brazil produce?” does return the figure 25%. The source for this is a 2005 essay by an Iowan high school student, submitted as an entry to a competition run by the World Food Prize Foundation. But while the essay includes various references to academic literature, the 25% figure itself doesn’t appear to be sourced.

We have asked Mr Longhi’s office where his data comes from, and are waiting for a response.

0% production of evidence

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