Vaccines against COVID-19 saved nearly 20 million lives during its first year, but even more deaths could have been avoided if international vaccination targets had been met, researchers said Thursday.
On December 8, 2020, a retired store employee in England received the first injection in what would become a global vaccination campaign. Over the next 12 months, more than 4.3 billion people worldwide lined up to receive vaccines.
The effort, though marred by persistent inequalities, prevented deaths on an unimaginable scale, said Oliver Watson of Imperial College London, who led the new modeling study.
“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to my mind,” Watson said of the result if vaccines to fight the coronavirus had not been available. The findings “quantify the worst that could have been the pandemic 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 the United Kingdom. United.
An additional 600,000 deaths would have been avoided if the World Health Organization’s goal of 40% 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 deaths were prevented by COVID-19, is based on estimates of how many more deaths than usual occurred during the time period. Using only COVID-19 deaths reported, the same model produced 14.4 million vaccine-prevented deaths.
Scientists in London excluded China because of uncertainty about the effect of the pandemic on the deaths there and its huge 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 didn’t care how the blockages or the use of masks could have changed if no vaccines were available.
Another modeling group used a different approach to estimate that vaccines prevented 16.3 million deaths from COVID-19. This work, from the Seattle Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment, has not been published.
In the real world, people wear masks more often when cases increase, said Ali Mokdad of the institute, and the 2021 delta wave without vaccines would have sparked a major political response.
“We may not agree on the number as scientists, but we all agree that vaccines against VOCID saved many lives,” Mokdad said.
The findings highlight both the successes and shortcomings of the vaccination campaign, said Adam Finn of Bristol Medical School in England, who like Mokdad did not participate in the study.
“While this time we did pretty well, we saved millions and millions of lives, we could have done better and we should have done better in the future,” Finn said.
Funding came from several groups, including the WHO; the UK Medical Research Council; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Carla K. Johnson, The Associated Press
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