The Millions Saved by Covid Vaccines

Between leftists sowing panic about Covid (and overselling the Covid vaccines) and Trumpsters all but pretending Covid doesn't exist (and yet that the vaccines didn't work at all or were even dangerous), I can understand why many people had trouble reaching a solid conclusion about whether taking one is a good idea.

And that would be true without the even more unhelpful fact that the left wants to violate our freedom by forcing us to be vaccinated -- while the right, led by Florida's Governor DeSantis, wants to violate our freedom by forcing us to associate with possible carriers of the disease. (It is a shame that DeSantis pairs this "anti-discrimination" policy with his correctly not using "lockdowns.")

With that out of the way, here is some good news as a respite from the bad coming from every corner today: Researchers have estimated that, despite their delayed and far from optimal rollout, the Covid vaccines have directly or indirectly saved about 20 million lives worldwide, reducing the death toll of the pandemic by close to two thirds:

Image by Daniel Schludi, via Unsplash, license.

The team found that, based on officially recorded COVID-19 deaths, an estimated 18.1 million deaths would have occurred during the study period if vaccinations had not been implemented. Of these, the model estimates that vaccination has prevented 14.4 million deaths, representing a global reduction of 79%. These findings do not account for the under-reporting of COVID-19 deaths, which is common in lower-income countries. The team did a further analysis based on total excess deaths during the same time period to account for this. They found that COVID-19 vaccination prevented an estimated 19.8 million deaths out of a total of 31.4 million potential deaths that would have occurred without vaccination, a reduction of 63%.

More than three quarters (79%, 15.5 million/19.8 million) of deaths averted were due to the direct protection against severe symptoms provided by vaccination, leading to lower mortality rates. The remaining 4.3 million averted deaths were estimated to have been prevented by indirect protection from reduced transmission of the virus in the population and reduced burden on healthcare systems, thereby improving access to medical care for those most in need. [bold added]

This is great news, but the report doesn't go far enough, because it frames this success in terms of the hospital crunch at the time, and then gets lost in the weeds of the ongoing difficulties of making the vaccine available worldwide.

Those aren't invalid concerns, but they ignore what being spared at any point in the pandemic can mean to an individual, particularly one who is (or cares about) someone at high risk from the disease.

First, the virus is changing in the way some experts predicted it would at the start of the pandemic: Selection pressure is favoring less-deadly mutants that are easier to transmit. Over time this virus will more closely resemble four other endemic coronaviruses that cause colds. Second, the longer medical science deals with this illness, the better treatments become.

In other words, the longer the vulnerable evade the virus, the less vulnerable they become relative to the original virus. For example, I am glad to know that Paxlovid is available now, if my wife or I catch this.

That's both good news and a lesson for when the next pandemic happens, if one should occur in our lifetimes. Part of me wants to catch this and get it over with will not even cross my mind, if that happens!

And that would be true, even if the next one doesn't turn out to be able to reinfect.

-- CAV