Unvaccinated people made up more than 60 per cent of patients admitted to critical care in England with confirmed Covid in December, according to new data.
In a strong indication of the value of vaccines, a report from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC), published on Friday, showed the percentage rising from November - while it had dropped over the summer and into October.
It comes as the government has put its trust in its booster programme during December and England has not introduced stiffer restrictions as has happened in other parts of the UK.
The new figures stated that last May, 75 per cent of patients admitted to critical care with the virus were unvaccinated.
But this number had fallen to 47 per cent in October which was "consistent with the decreasing proportion of the general population who were unvaccinated", said the report, but rose to 50.8 per cent in November and 60.8 per cent in mid-December.
For December, London had the highest percentage of unvaccinated critical care patients (66.7 per cent), followed by the South West (66.2 per cent) and then the North West (64.8 per cent).
The lowest was the South East of England, at 50.6 per cent.
Of those in critical care beds across England in December, 2.8 per cent had one dose of vaccine, 27.5 per cent had two doses, and 8.9 per cent had a booster.
The average age of critically ill patients across the eight-month period from May to December was 50 years for the unvaccinated, 52 for those who had one dose and 64 for those who had two or more doses of vaccine, the report said.
Looking ahead to 2022, Health Secretary Sajid Javid has said the government was only going to look at new restrictions as an "absolute last resort".
Latest figures have shown that there is another record for daily reported Covid cases with another 189,846 lab confirmed positives on Friday.
Javid, writing in the Daily Mail, said England had "welcomed in 2022 with some of the least restrictive measures in Europe", with the government at odds with the devolved nations in choosing to keep nightclubs open and to allow hospitality to operate without further measures for new year celebrations.
"Curbs on our freedom must be an absolute last resort and the British people rightly expect us to do everything in our power to avert them," he said.
"Since I came into this role six months ago, I've also been acutely conscious of the enormous health, social and economic costs of lockdowns.
"So I've been determined that we must give ourselves the best chance of living alongside the virus and avoiding strict measures in the future."
