Reports of Allegations of COVID-19 Vaccines Causing Injury, Harm and/or Death
Keywords
Reports, Allegations, COVID-19, Vaccines, Causing, Injury, Harm, Death, Criminal, Investigation, STORM, Incident.
Publication Number
PUB 1080
FOI Reference Number
16664
Request Title
Reports of Allegations of COVID-19 Vaccines Causing Injury, Harm and/or Death
Date Range
January 2021 to December 2021
Information Requested
Would you please be able to provide any data regarding if /how many reports were received between January 2021 to December 2021 in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine and allegations it may be causing injury, harm and/or death. And if any/how many of these reports have led the start of a criminal investigation.
Disclosure with Exemptions
Full Refusal with Section 12 Exemption
Information Correct as at
N/A
Date of Disclosure
14 February 2022
Related Documents/Links
FOI 16664 Response
Having completed enquiries within Essex Police in respect of Section 1(1)(a), Essex Police does hold information relating to your request, however, the obligation of Section 1(1)(b) cannot be met as Essex Police does not hold all the information requested in a format that allows it to be retrieved within the time and cost limits of FOI.
When responding to a request for information under the terms of the FOIA, a public authority is not obliged to provide information if the authority estimates that the cost of the retrieval of the information requested would be in excess of £450 (equivalent to 18 hours work). The costs criteria relates to a request in its entirety, which means that if we cannot retrieve all of the information requested within the costs limit, we are not obliged to retrieve any of the information requested.
Section 12(1) of the FOIA states that a public authority is not obliged to:
“…comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.”
The following explanation outlines the difficulty Essex Police has in answering your request:
Essex Police are unable to accurately extract the level of detail in relation to your request for the requested period from our current systems. Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not primarily for the production of statistical information for FOI responses. If a keyword search was undertaken on S.T.O.R.M. (Strategic Tasking Organisational Resource Management system) for ‘COVID’ or ‘VACCINE’, this would yield a very large number of results. This would then require each S.T.O.R.M. incident report to be manually reviewed one by one to establish whether or not it meets the criteria of this request. To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the act to create data purely to answer FOI requests.
Consequently, and to this extent, Essex Police are exempt from the duty to provide information you have requested under the provisions of Section 12(1) of the FOIA. Therefore, and in accordance with Section 17(1) of the FOIA, this communication must act as a refusal notice to provide all of the information that could be interpreted as being captured by this part of your request.