LONDON
Nearly 20 million lives were saved from COVID-19 vaccines in their first year, but even more deaths could have been prevented if international vaccine targets had been met, researchers said.
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On December 8, 2020, a retired salesman in England received his first injection into what would become a global vaccination campaign. Over the next 12 months, more than 4.3 billion people worldwide signed up for vaccines. The effort, albeit overshadowed by ongoing inequalities, has prevented deaths on an unimaginable scale, said Oliver Watson of Imperial College London, who is leading the new modeling.
“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to mind,” Watson said of the outcome, if no coronavirus vaccines were available. The results “measure how much worse a pandemic could be if we didn’t have these vaccines.” The researchers used data from 185 countries to estimate that vaccines prevented 4.2 million deaths from COVID-19 in India, 1.9 million in the United States, 1 million in Brazil, 631,000 in France and 507,000 in France. United Kingdom. An additional 600,000 deaths would have been prevented if the World Health Organization (WHO) target of 40 percent vaccination by the end of 2021 had been met, according to a study published June 23 in the Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The main finding, 19.8 million deaths from COVID-19 were prevented, is based on estimates of how many more deaths than usual occurred over time. Using only reported deaths from COVID-19, the same model yielded 14.4 million vaccine-prevented deaths. London researchers have ruled out China because of uncertainty about the effect of the pandemic on deaths there and its vast population. The study has other limitations. The researchers did not include how the virus could have mutated differently in the absence of vaccines. And they did not consider how blocking or wearing masks could change if vaccines were not available. Another modeling group used a different approach to estimate that 16.3 million COVID-19 deaths were prevented by vaccines. This work by the Seattle Institute for Health Indicators and Evaluation has not been published. In the real world, people wear masks more often when the cases increase, said Ali Moqdad of the institute, and the delta wave in 2021 without vaccines would provoke a major policy response.
“We may not agree on the number as scientists, but we all agree that vaccines against COVID have saved many lives,” Moqdad said. The results highlight both the achievements and shortcomings of the vaccination campaign, said Adam Finn of Bristol Medical School in England, who, like Moqdad, was not involved in the study. “Even though we did pretty well this time, we saved millions and millions of lives, we could have done better and we need to do better in the future,” Finn said.
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