Ethnicity is not in itself a 'risk factor' for Covid-19, a minister has said.
Ministers say they are working to reduce "vaccine hesitancy" and disinformation within minority communities to increase take-up of the jab.
But Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch said using acronyms such as BAME "doesn't help get to the nub of the issue".
And Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi admitted the government does not centrally hold data on how many people have refused to have the jab.
But he said people who turn it down and later change their minds would get a "second chance".
Answering a question on the issue of ethnicity, Ms Badenoch told the Women and Equalities committee: "I think it's a cross-party belief that using those acronyms to describe what is actually an unbelievably diverse group of people doesn't help get to the nub of the issue," she told MPs.
"Lumping everyone together in a group as a proxy for 'not white' is not how we deal with things from a health perspective.
"Skin colour is not, and I say this repeatedly because I think it is a very important point to make, that ethnicity, in all the research that we have had to us and summarised, ethnicity is not the risk factor, it correlates with a lot of things.
"So we can't use skin colour as a substitute for directing policy."
© VIA REUTERSVaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi
But Mr Zahawi said the government is taking steps to improve take up of the jab among minority communities.
He said NHS England had worked with Hatzola, the Orthodox Jewish volunteer ambulance corps, to distribute the vaccine in Hackney.
And he said GPs contracts had been amended to allow for "pop-up" vaccination sites.
"We're also making sure that we talk to, whether it be a church, or a mosque, or a temple, that want to host a pop-up - we've amended the GPs contracts to allow for them to do that - all of that is really working well," he told MPs.
"You will begin to see that reflected in the uptick in the numbers of each of those cohorts that we are focusing on."
But he said disinformation around vaccines and fertility was "proving to be sadly quite potent" among women.
"We want to keep making sure that we communicate to women," he told the Committee.
"Because some of the anti-vax messages, which are clearly directed at both young men and women around fertility, are false, but proving to be sadly quite potent.
"Some of the focus groups and polling evidence suggests much of the hesitancy is around issues around fertility."
Mr Zahawi said data is not held centrally on vaccine refusal rates.
"We don't centrally hold data on refusal rates, but of course we know the size of each cohort," he told the Committee.
"We can certainly use different data sets to estimate, whether it's ONS (Office for National Statistics) data or otherwise, so we know how far we are getting in terms of vaccinating each cohort.
"We continue to publish that and we publish by age now as we go down each category."
Ms Badenoch told MPs that she and Mr Zahawi had both joined trials for the coronavirus vaccine following misinformation about jabs being tested on ethnic minorities.
"One of the helpful things about having ethnic minorities in these ministerial positions is that we have a totally different perspective, or an additional perspective rather, and you kind of get early warning signals," she told the Committee.
"You will remember back in 2020 we didn't even know if we were going to have a vaccine and the emphasis was actually on trials.
"We could see the misinformation around the vaccine being tested on ethnic minorities and things like that.
"That was one of the reasons why very early on I decided to go on vaccine trials and encouraged others to do so, Nadhim (Zahawi) did the same thing.
"All of that was trying to build the confidence in people that this is something that is safe, this is something that we want to encourage as many people as possible to get involved in, and improve their understanding of what trials means."