Covid vaccines may have saved 2,000,000 American lives

 How effective are the Covid vaccines? Here's some new data:

A team of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the California Department of Public health developed two different data-based models of the course of the Covid pandemic in California in the ten months after vaccines became available. They published their results in the April 22, 2022 edition of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

Projected Covid deaths without vaccination
(Image by Eric C. Schnieder, et al.)   Details   DMCA

Their first model estimated that during the ten months prior to October 16, 2021, Covid vaccinations in California averted 1.52 million infections, 72,930 hospitalizations and 19,430 deaths.

The second model estimated that during those same ten months, vaccinations prevented 1.4 million Covid cases, 84,330 hospitalizations and 22,620 deaths.

The researchers limited themselves to pointing out that these results "can be generalized across the United States." We can take a stab at doing that if we assume that the vaccines averted cases, hospitalizations and deaths at roughly the same rate across the country as they did in California. By the end of the study period, 23,800,846 Californians were fully vaccinated. At that same time 188,902,483 Americans had been fully vaccinated, or 7.94 times the number in California alone.

Multiplying by that factor, the vaccines conservatively averted 11,116,000 Covid cases, 579,064 hospitalizations and 154,036 deaths in the US in the first 10 months of their availability.

On February 25 of this year I posted an OpEdNews article providing a count--based on the actual differences between week-by-week death rates among unvaccinated and vaccinated people--of how many American lives the Covid vaccines had saved to that date.

My estimate was that 545,000 Americans were still alive because they had gotten vaccinated. It's important to note that those only represented lives saved directly by the vaccines, not infections, hospitalizations or deaths averted among the contacts of people who stayed healthy because they were vaccinated.

Similarly, the UCSF researchers note that their estimates only count people whose lives were saved because they were vaccinated--direct lives saved. They point out that many more Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths were doubtlessly averted among the contacts of vaccinated people. "The true numbers are definitely significantly higher," says lead author Sophia Tan, at UCSF.

To get a sense of how just how much higher, we have a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, a century-old private foundation that promotes effective and equitable health care in the US. They used a highly detailed model that, along with many other factors, accounts for contagion, hospitalization and deaths within people's contact networks. Their study provides estimates through March, 2022.

Those researchers estimate that Covid vaccinations have probably prevented more than 66 million infections, more than 17 million hospitalizations and more than 2 million deaths in the United States.

Given the high cost of health care in the US, we shouldn't be surprised that, according to the Commonwealth study, averting those millions of infections, hospitalizations and deaths saved some $900 billion--that's nearly one trillion dollars--in healthcare costs.

As of April 25, 2022, the US has suffered just under one million Covid deaths. If the 219 million Americans who are fully vaccinated had chosen not to, the number of US Covid deaths would have been much higher, perhaps approaching a shocking 3 million.

The Covid pandemic is at low ebb right now, but it has not disappeared. The vaccines are readily available and free. If you're among the one-third of Americans who have not yet gotten vaccinated, it's not too late to protect yourself and the people you are close to.

How many lives have the COVID vaccines saved?

 This really shouldn't be controversial.

In response to a worldwide pandemic, scientists built on decades of research in genetics and virology to design, create, test and deploy multiple COVID vaccines in record time. Three vaccines were approved for use in the US--Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer and Moderna. To date 214 million Americans--65%--are fully vaccinated and 93 million--28%--have gotten a booster. The vaccines and boosters are known to reduce COVID cases, severe illness, hospitalization and deaths.

The question is, how many deaths have the vaccines actually prevented--how many Americans are alive today who would be dead had they remained unvaccinated?

A doctor receiving a COVID vaccination

Credit: DOD

I know that many people's eyes glaze over when numbers are involved, and the next section includes a lot of numbers. For those with a numerical allergy, feel free to jump to the paragraph in bold that starts with "During the 39 weeks . . ."

The numbers:

To address the question of how many lives COVID vaccination has saved, I examined week-by-week US death rates by vaccination status between April 10, 2021 and January 1, 2022, and coordinated those with week-by-week numbers of Americans fully vaccinated.

During those 39 weeks the number of fully vaccinated Americans rose from 82.9 million to 207.4 million. As the pandemic waxed and waned, the weekly rates of COVID deaths among unvaccinated people ranged from 0.92 to 14.27 per 100,000 while the comparable rates for fully vaccinated people varied from 0.07 to 1.23 per 100,000.

The ratio of deaths per 100,000 comparing unvaccinated to vaccinated people ranged from 6.6 to 18 with an average of 11.85. That is, on average over those 39 weeks, unvaccinated Americans died from COVID at 11.85 the rate of their fully vaccinated peers.

The difference between the rate of deaths between unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people ranged from 0.85 deaths per 100,000 people during weeks when the pandemic was at a low ebb to 13.04 per 100,000 at its peak.

Knowing the number of vaccinated people in a given week and the death rate for unvaccinated people at that time, we can calculate the number of deaths that would have occurred among the vaccinated group if they had remained unvaccinated. We can calculate how many lives were saved by subtracting the actual number of deaths in the vaccinated group from the number of people in that group who would have died if unvaccinated.

Here's an example, using the week of December 18, 2021:

Number of fully vaccinated people: 205.3 million

Death rate among unvaccinated people: 92.5 per million

How many would have died at the unvaccinated rate: 205.3 x 92.5 = 18,990

Death rate among fully vaccinated: 8 per million

How many fully vaccinated people actually died: 205.3 x 8 = 1,642

Number of lives saved that week: 18,990 - 1642 = 17,348

We can then calculate that figure for each of the 39 weeks for which we have data and add them up. That gets us the answer to our question:

During the 39 weeks between April 10, 2021 and January 1, 2022, if nobody had been vaccinated we would have seen approximately 416,999 more deaths.

To put it differently, during those 39 weeks, COVID vaccinations saved approximately 417,000 American lives. That's an average of 10,692 lives saved per week, or 1527 per day.

If the COVID vaccines had not been available, the additional lives lost would have surpassed all American lives lost in World War II.

This conservative estimate of lives saved doesn't include those saved during the 20 weeks between the start of vaccinations in the US on December 14, 2020 and April 10, 2021, or the lives saved since January 1, 2022, or the additional lives saved among people who are fully vaccinated and boosted.

We can fill in those gaps at least in part. Researchers at the NIH and Rand Corporation used a modeling approach to estimate the number of lives saved by vaccines from December 14, 2020 through May 9, 2021. They arrived at a figure of 139,000 for that period. If we subtract the 10,436 deaths in the weeks where their figures overlap mine, we can add another 128,564 American lives saved by vaccines before April 10, 2021.

We don't have US COVID death rates by vaccination status after January 1, 2022, but we do have those numbers for two states, Texas and Washington. They show the same pattern, with unvaccinated people dying at between 7 and 18 times the rate of their fully vaccinated peers. It's safe to say that the number of lives saved by the COVID vaccines continues to grow.

So, even without counting the lives saved by vaccines so far in 2022, as a very conservative estimate COVID vaccinations have saved 417,000 + 128,500--more than 545,000 American lives.

What about the rest of the world?

Ten other countries report COVID deaths by vaccination status. You can find the details here. On average across those countries unvaccinated people died from COVID at 9.5 times the rate of vaccinated people, quite comparable to the 11.85 ratio seen in the U.S. over time. The average difference between the death rates per 100,000 for unvaccinated vs fully vaccinated people was actually greater than the comparable figure for the US. Thus it seems reasonable to use the lives saved in the U.S. to estimate lives saved worldwide.

This is supported by data from Europe. A study jointly published by WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control estimates that between the beginning of vaccination in Europe in December, 2020 through November of 2021, vaccines saved nearly 470,000 lives just in those aged 60 and older.

The 214 million Americans who are fully vaccinated represent slightly less than one-twentieth of the number of fully vaccinated people worldwide, currently estimated at 4.355 billion. If we multiply 545,000 lives saved in the US by a factor of 20, we get an admittedly rough estimate of how many lives the vaccines have saved worldwide--10,900,000.

That's a lot of mothers and fathers, grandparents and grandchildren, husbands and wives, workers and homemakers, friends and lovers, regular people who are still alive because they chose to get vaccinated.

Perhaps we should be thanking Anthony Fauci and other public figures and leaders who have encouraged and advocated vaccination rather than calling them mass murderers who should be jailed or executed-- tropes that far too frequently appear on right-wing news sources and saturate social media.

 

Worldwide data on covid vaccine effectivenss

More than a year into the massive worldwide vaccination rollout, people still voice a wide range of opinions--from confidence that the benefits of the shots far outweigh their risks to an often intensely held belief that they offer few or no benefits and are extremely dangerous. Claims like those are widely disseminated via social media, and almost certainly have contributed to the relatively low vaccination and booster rates in the US.

Readers interested in what's known about the risks of the vaccines from several large-scale studies can find reports here, here and here.

In terms of benefits, official sources in the US and many other countries consistently assure the public that the vaccines significantly reduce the risk of contracting covid, more strongly reduce the risk of serious illness and hospitalization, and even more dramatically reduce the risk of death from covid. With the passage of time following people's vaccinations, and especially during the omicron surge, authorities have noted that the protection from full vaccination (usually defined as two mRNA doses or one J&J injection) has declined while protection following a booster remains high.

People who view the vaccines as ineffective and/or dangerous often flatly discount data about vaccine effectiveness, particularly those coming from the US CDC. At times such views are backed by specific arguments, such as that counting people as unvaccinated for the two weeks that follow vaccination conflates those who are and aren't vaccinated and so renders the data meaningless. At other times the CDC data are completely dismissed on the assumption or belief that they are essentially made up as part of some kind of overriding plot.

To clarify these issues, it might be useful to look at comparable data from other countries. Those who view the vaccines as ineffective often take a stab at this by citing a number of countries that have both high vaccination rates and high case, hospitalization or death rates. Unfortunately, such lists usually turn out to be the product of "cherry-picking"--that is one can easily find an equal number of countries with high vaccination rates and low case counts, low vaccination rates and low case counts or low vaccination rates and high case counts. Or covid-vaccine critics point to a few times and places where case numbers or case rates have been more or less equal between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, while ignoring hospitalization and death rates, which consistently strongly favor vaccinated populations.

A more meaningful way that a number of countries use to assess vaccine effectiveness is simply to compare the rates of covid cases, hospitalizations or deaths per 100,000 people between unvaccinated and vaccinated cohorts, or between unvaccinated, vaccinated, and boosted subsets of their population.

In practice this turns out not to be a simple undertaking. Apart from the technical and organizational issues of gathering, collating and reporting on the underlying data, countries must decide on what categories to use and how to define them. For example, some countries count people as vaccinated as soon as they have received their first shot; others, including the US, count people as unvaccinated until two weeks after a first vaccination; while some count people as unvaccinated until three weeks after vaccination. Some countries provide more data (e.g. cases, hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination status over time) while some only provide data for one of those outcomes, or for specific age groups. In addition, the time periods for which data is available vary country by country.

While those differences may make it difficult to precisely equate the findings from various countries, we can certainly learn something from these additional, independent sources.

I've been able to find data on covid death rates by vaccination status for 11 countries plus the Spanish region of Catalonia. The numbers that follow represent the most recent data I could locate.

A good place to start is with Our World in Data. They provide graphs and numerical data of weekly death rates by vaccination status over time for three countries, Switzerland, the US and Chile, plus graphs and monthly data for England. The graphs are well worth viewing and studying.

1. Switzerland (includes Liechtenstein), population approximately 9 million:

Weekly covid deaths per 100,000 people, week ending January 22, 2022

Unvaccinated: 10.71

Fully vaccinated: 0.97

Fully vaccinated and boosted: 0.19

As of 1/22/2022, unvaccinated Swiss were 11 times more likely to die from covid than those who were fully vaccinated, and 56 times more likely to die from covid than their boosted peers.

Detailed category definitions can be found here.

2. United States, population approximately 331 million:

Weekly covid deaths per 100,000 people, week ending December 3, 2021

Unvaccinated: 9.74

Fully vaccinated: 0.71

Fully vaccinated and boosted: 0.10

Unvaccinated Americans were 14 times more likely to die from covid than those who were fully vaccinated, and 97 times more likely to die from covid than their boosted peers.

Detailed category definitions can be found here.

3. Chile, population approximately 19 million:

Weekly covid deaths per 100,000 people, week ending January 15, 2022

Not vaccinated or not fully vaccinated: 1.81

Fully vaccinated: 1.32

Fully vaccinated and boosted: 0.19

Chileans who were either not vaccinated or not fully vaccinated were 1.4 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated, and 9.5 times more likely to die from covid than their boosted peers.

Detailed category definitions can be found here.

4. England, population approximately 57 million:

Monthly covid death rates per 100,000 people, month ending October 15, 2021

Unvaccinated: 23.8

Fully vaccinated: 5.20

English citizens who were not vaccinated were 4.6 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated.

Detailed category definitions can be found here.

5. Malaysia, population approximately 33 million:

Weekly covid death rates per 100,000 people, week ending February 3, 2022

Unvaccinated: 5.4

Two doses: 0.5

Boosted: less than 0.1

Malaysians who were not vaccinated were 10.8 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated, and more than 54 times more likely to die than those who were boosted.

Graph for the past six months and detailed category definitions can be found here.

6. Singapore, population approximately 6 million:

Daily covid deaths per 100,000 people, week ending January 27, 2022

Not vaccinated: 0.67

Fully vaccinated: 0.23

Boosted: 0.07

Residents of Singapore who were not vaccinated were 2.9 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated, and 9.6 times more likely to die than those who were boosted.

Graphs and detailed category definitions can be found here.

7. France, population approximately 65 million:

Monthly covid deaths per 100,000 people, month ending December 1, 2021

Not vaccinated: 35.65

Partly vaccinated: 9.74

Fully vaccinated: 4.38

Residents of France who were not vaccinated were 3.7 times more likely to die than those who were partly vaccinated, and 8.1 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated.

Graphs and detailed category definitions can be found here.

8. Italy, population approximately 60 million:

Monthly covid deaths per 100,000 people, month ending January 9, 2022

Not vaccinated: 78.6

Fully vaccinated: 9.5

Boosted: 3.2

Unvaccinated Italians were 8.3 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers, and 24.6 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated and boosted.

Detailed category definitions can be found here.

9. Canada, population approximately 38 million:

Cumulative covid deaths per 100,000 people, December 14, 2020 through January 22, 2022

Unvaccinated: 975

Not yet protected: 1530

Partly vaccinated: 1010

Fully vaccinated: 384

Unvaccinated Canadians were 2.54 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers. Not-yet-protected Canadians were 3.98 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers. Partly vaccinated Canadians were 2.63 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers.

Detailed category definitions can be found here.

10. Catalonia, Spain, population approximately 8 million

Cumulative deaths per 100,000 people between December 23, 2021 and January 12, 2022

Ages 70 and above

Unvaccinated: 50

Fully vaccinated: 5

Unvaccinated Catalonians 70 years old or older were 10 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers.

Ages 60 - 69

Unvaccinated: 15

Fully vaccinated: 5.5

Unvaccinated Catalonians in the 60 to 69 age group were 2.7 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers.

More information can be found here and here.

11. Israel, population approximately 9 million:

Deaths per 100,000 people between August 10, 2021 and September 8, 2021

Under 60 years of age

Not vaccinated: 0.7

Fully vaccinated: 0.23

Boosted: 0.26

Unvaccinated Israelis under the age of 60 were 3 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers, and 2.7 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated and boosted.

60 years of age or older

Not vaccinated: 161.5

Vaccinated: 51.71

Boosted: 10.06

Unvaccinated Israelis 60 years old or older were 3.1 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers, and 16 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated and boosted.

More information can be found here and here.

A few take-aways:

Data detailing death rates by vaccination status were found for 11 countries or regions with a total population of 637 million people.

Despite different populations, methodologies, category definitions and time spans, the data consistently show that unvaccinated people are significantly more likely to die from covid than their vaccinated peers and are at at even higher risk when compared to fully vaccinated and boosted peers.

The risk ratios comparing covid death rates among unvaccinated vs. fully vaccinated people ranged from 1.4 (Chile) to 14 (US) with a median value of 4.6.

The risk ratios comparing covid death rates among unvaccinated vs. vaccinated and boosted people ranged from 9.5 (Chile) to 97 (US) with a median value of 16. In other words, in all countries providing statistics on covid deaths by vaccination status, unvaccinated people died at 9.5 times the rate or more than their vaccinated and boosted peers.

In short, the most recent available data from 11 countries representing 637 million people consistently demonstrate that fully vaccinated people are significantly less likely to die from covid than their unvaccinated peers, and fully vaccinated and boosted people are many times less likely to die from covid than their unvaccinated peers.

Those who reflexively discount covid data from the US CDC may need to cast a wider net in order to ignore the data from at least 10 other countries.