Covid-19 vaccines ‘saved 20 million lives’ in first year, study says
- The study is the first attempt to estimate the number of deaths prevented through Covid-19 vaccinations
- Covid-19 has officially killed more than 6.3 million people globally, but the real number could be as high as 15 million
Nearly 20 million lives were saved by Covid-19 vaccines during their first year, but even more deaths could have been prevented if international targets for the shots had been reached, researchers reported.
On December 8, 2020, a retired shop clerk in England received the first shot in what would become a global vaccination campaign. Over the next 12 months, more than 4.3 billion people around the world lined up for the vaccines.
The effort, though marred by persisting inequities, prevented deaths on an unimaginable scale, said Oliver Watson of Imperial College London, who led the new modelling study.
“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to mind,” Watson said of the outcome if vaccines hadn’t been available to fight the coronavirus. The findings “quantify just how much worse the pandemic could have been if we did not have these vaccines.”
The researchers used data from 185 countries to estimate that vaccines prevented 4.2 million Covid-19 deaths in India, 1.9 million in the United States, 1 million in Brazil, 631,000 in France and 507,000 in the United Kingdom.
An additional 600,000 deaths would have been prevented if the World Health Organization target of 40 per cent vaccination coverage by the end of 2021 had been met, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
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The main finding - 19.8 million Covid-19 deaths were prevented - is based on estimates of how many more deaths than usual occurred during the time period. Using only reported Covid-19 deaths, the same model yielded 14.4 million deaths averted by vaccines.
The London scientists excluded China because of uncertainty around the pandemic’s effect on deaths there and its huge population.
The study has other limitations. The researchers did not include how the virus might have mutated differently in the absence of vaccines. And they did not factor in how lockdowns or mask wearing might have changed if vaccines weren’t available.
Another modeling group used a different approach to estimate that 16.3 million Covid-19 deaths were averted by vaccines. That work, by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, has not been published.
In the real world, people wear masks more often when cases are surging, said the institute’s Ali Mokdad, and 2021’s delta wave without vaccines would have prompted a major policy response.
“We may disagree on the number as scientists, but we all agree that Covid vaccines saved lots of lives,” Mokdad said.
The findings underscore both the achievements and the shortcomings of the vaccination campaign, said Adam Finn of Bristol Medical School in England, who like Mokdad was not involved in the study.
“Although we did pretty well this time - we saved millions and millions of lives — we could have done better and we should do better in the future,” Finn said.
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Covid-19 has officially killed more than 6.3 million people globally, according to the World Health Organization.
But the organisation said last month the real number could be as high as 15 million, when all direct and indirect causes are accounted for.
The figures are extremely sensitive due to how they reflect on the handling of the crisis by authorities around the world.
The virus is on the rise again in some places, including in Europe, which is seeing a warm-weather resurgence blamed in part on Omicron subvariants.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
