Tagged white spaces from Word causes accessibility problems

I am converting Word docs into pdfs. In the tagging process as the conversion happens, all the white spaces (i.e. returns etc) are tagged. When this then runs through the WCAG 2.2 accessibilty checker (PAC) it flags it as a problem, which it is. People using screen readers don´t want to be hearing "blank" all the time when coming across these tags.
Going back to the Word doc to reformat it with spacing in the paragraph settings would not really work because of the type of document we have.

The resulting pdf has sometimes hundreds of these empty tags. If you try to delete the empty tag, it´s still a problem because the accessibility checker then says that item is missing a tag. So, it seems I need a way to mark these items as artifacts but I am not going to go through every single one of these in turn to mark them. I need a way to batch mark these items as artifacts. How can I do this? Or is there any alternative (needing the fix in the pdf rather than Word).

Phew! TIA