18 June 2021
Tracy Livingston
[FYI request #15591 email]
Tēnā koe Tracy
Your Official Information Act request, reference: GOV-011573
I refer to your email of 27 May 2021, sent to the Ministry of Health, asking for information relating to
the COVID vaccine. The following part of your request was transferred to ACC under the Official
Information Act 1982 (the Act) on 3 June 2021:
How many ACC claim forms have been received to date for Covid vaccine adverse events, and
what were the adverse events?
Vaccination related claims
A physical injury resulting from vaccination, including a COVID-19 vaccine, may be covered by ACC if the
criteria for a treatment injury are met. A treatment injury is a personal injury caused as a result of a
person seeking or receiving (or not receiving) treatment from a registered health professional. To fulfil
the criteria for cover the client must have suffered a personal injury, there must be a clear causal link
between the treatment and the injury, and the injury must not be a necessary part or ordinary
consequence of the treatment.
COVID-19 vaccine related claims
ACC treatment injury data captures the treatment event that resulted in the claimed injury, if a
medication was associated with the injury the medication type and name are recorded under two data
fields. In the response below the vaccination figures include claims with treatment event = vaccination
OR treatment event = injection/medication adverse reaction/medication error with the medication type
recorded as a vaccine. This has been further limited to those cases where the COVID vaccine has been
identified as relating to the claim.
So that all recent COVID vaccination related injuries submitted to ACC are captured in this response
additional claims have been identified via a free text search of ACC45 claim application forms received
by ACC. For this analysis these additional claims have been identified where the ACC45 form accident
description or additional comments contain ‘Pfizer’ or ‘Covid’ together with ‘vacc’ or mentions the
Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by its name ‘Comirnaty’.
Free text search methods are not reliable data extraction methods and can result in anomalies in the
data. To overcome this all claims we manually reviewed all the identified claims and any false positives
removed from the extract. Examples of such exclusions are references to injuries sustained prior to
arriving at a vaccination centre but which met the simple text search criteria indicated above. Other
claims meeting the text criteria above have also been removed from the analysis where it has been
determined following review of the notes provided by the lodging clinician that it is clear that the claim
is for something other than an adverse reaction to the vaccine.
GOV-011573
Our response
As of 8 June 2021, 362,000 vaccinations have been carried out. Between 19 February 2021 and 5 June
2021, ACC received 112 claims for injuries that may be associated with a COVID vaccination. The tables
below show the status of those claims as at 8 June 2021.
Table 1: Decision status of claims mentioning COVID vaccination
Status of Claim
Treatment Injuries
Other Injuries
Accepted
19
8
Declined
11
0
Decision pending
70
4
The 70 ‘decision pending’ claims are yet to be processed as treatment injuries and are likely to be a
mixture of claims for treatment injury and personal injury caused by accident. The latter claims may be
unrelated to the vaccination itself but are included in the table above because the claim form
mentioned the COVID vaccination, and it has yet to be determined whether it was a contributory factor.
Table 2: Primary injuries for accepted treatment injury claims following COVID vaccination
Primary Injury
Number of Accepted Claims
Adverse/Allergic reaction excluding anaphylaxis
11
Anaphylactic reaction
4
Other injury
4
Other injuries include infection, cellulitis and unspecified injuries.
For more detailed information about Covid-19 vaccinations please see the information on the Ministry
of Health’s website
at COVID-19: Vaccine side effects and reactions | Ministry of Health NZ. The
Ministry publishes data more detailed data on adverse events.
How to contact us
If you have any questions, you can email me at
[email address]. Nāku iti noa, nā
Sasha Wood
Manager Official Information Act Services
Government Engagement & Support
Accident Compensation Corporation
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