FOI-03506

Thank you for your request for information about the following: 

<strong>Request</strong>

You asked us:

<i>‘to request information held by your organisation relating to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine identified as “Pfizer FH4751”.

Please provide the following information:

(1) The total number of Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme claims received in which the index vaccine is identified as Pfizer FH4751, for the entire period for which you hold records.

(2) Of those claims, the number in which the reported injury, illness, or cause of death includes:

dyspnoea or shortness of breath; and/or cardiopulmonary events (including, but not limited to, myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, heart failure, cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis with cardiopulmonary involvement, unexplained sudden death with suspected cardiopulmonary cause).

For the subset of claims described in (2), please provide, in anonymised aggregated form:

The number of claims that have been accepted and resulted in an award under the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme; and

The number of claims that have been refused, together with the primary reasons for refusal recorded in your system (for example, causation not established, severity threshold not met, out of time, or other categorisations used by your organisation).

The date range covered by the data in your response (for example, first and last dates of claims received and/or determined for Pfizer FH4751).

If you do not hold some or all of the requested information, please confirm this, and, if possible, indicate which public authority is more likely to hold it.’</i>

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 6 January 2026.

We have handled your request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.

<strong>Our response</strong>

The NHSBSA may hold some of the requested information; however, we estimate that the cost of compliance with the request would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12 of the FOIA.  
 
We estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving, extracting and checking the information.   

While we record the vaccine manufacturer against each claim, we do not record the vaccine batch number.

The vaccine batch number may be available in some of the medical records held, however it would require a manual review of each record to locate, retrieve and extract the information.

5,611 Pfizer vaccine claims have been awarded or rejected. We estimate that it would take a minimum of five minutes per case to check if a batch number is available in the medical records for each of these claims.

Therefore, please see the following calculation which sets out the estimated cost for compliance with this request: 

5,611 x 5 minutes = 28,055 minutes = 467.58 hours

Please see the following link to view the section 12 in full: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/12  

<strong>Advice and assistance</strong>

Please be advised that due to the way that the information is held by the NHSBSA, it is not possible to submit a refined request under the appropriate limit.

<strong>Data Queries</strong>

Please contact <a href=mailto:foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk>foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk</a>  ensuring you quote the above reference if you have any specific questions regarding this response; or, if you feel you may be misunderstanding or misinterpreting the information; or, if you plan on publishing the data.

<strong>Reusing the data and copyright</strong>

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact <a href=mailto:communicationsteam@nhsbsa.nhs.uk>communicationsteam@nhsbsa.nhs.uk</a>. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement: “NHSBSA Copyright 2026” This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence:<br>
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.

Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.



Tags: NHSBSA corporate, Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, nhsbsa, vdps
Organization: Freedom of Information Disclosure Log