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.

 

SOME ACTUAL DATA ABOUT BREAKTHROUGH COVID INFECTIONS

By now we've all heard about breakthrough covid cases--fully vaccinated people who still end up testing positive for covid. The standard line is that such cases are rare, that even if vaccinated people do catch covid, they are likely to have only mild symptoms. 

I've now come across some actual data, from Oklahoma and the District of Columbia, the two US state-level entities that publish detailed information about overall case rates and case rates among vaccinated citizens.

   Credit: Healthwatch Lambeth

Here's the lowdown:

In Oklahoma to date, 506,020 people out of a population of 3,956,971 have tested positive for covid. That's 12.8 percent of the population.

Of those 3,956,971 Oklahomans, 1,979,236 are fully vaccinated, either with the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine--almost exactly 50 percent. Of those nearly two million vaccinated citizens, just 2,514 have suffered a breakthrough covid infection. That's just 0.127 percent of the vaccinated group.

So, if we compare a case rate of 12.8 percent with a case rate of 0.127 percent, it looks as though unvaccinated Oklahomans are slightly more than 100 times as likely to come down with covid as their vaccinated peers.

Let's see how the stats for DC compare:

DC has a population of 705,749. Of these, to date, 52,005 have tested positive for covid, for an overall case rate of 7.37 percent.

Among the DC population, 299,020--42 percent--are fully vaccinated, again with one of the same three vaccines. Among that group there have been 546 breakthrough cases; a vaccinated case rate of 0.183 percent.

Comparing 0.183 percent vs 7.37 percent, it looks as though unvaccinated residents of DC are 40 times more likely to have had covid than their vaccinated neighbors.

As reported by Nicoletta Lanese of LiveScience.com here, the three vaccines vary consistently in their effectiveness. Here's a breakdown of the breakthrough percentages:

                         Oklahoma             DC             

Moderna              0.12                0.13            

Pfizer                    0.17                0.20

J & J                     0.21                0.32

Overall                0.127              0.183

(Note that the overall case rates for vaccinated people are not exact averages of the rates for the three vaccines because different numbers of people received each of the three vaccines.)

Based on the data from Oklahoma and DC, it would be fair to conclude that fully vaccinated people are somewhere between 40 and 100 times less likely to catch covid than are their unvaccinated fellow citizens. In addition, as has been reported, those who do have a breakthrough case are far less likely to progress to severe illness, hospitalization or death. 

Of course, further data could modify this, but for now, I'm extremely glad to be fully vaccinated, congratulate everyone who has gotten their shots, and strongly urge anyone who has not yet been vaccinated to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Being 40 to 100 times safer is a very big deal.

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REA 8/12/2021