According to the World Health Organization (WHO), close to 15 million people died due to the pandemic a few months ago. Without vaccines, the gruesome number of deaths could have been much higher. Undoubtedly, the mass vaccine stood up against covid and turned the war around. According to dozens of studies, vaccines did exactly what they promised: saving lives.

Today, we have numbers of how many lives have been saved thanks to them.

The effort that saves the world. It is a proven fact that vaccines save lives. A recently published study Lancet Infectious Diseases concluded that injections saved between 19.1 and 20.4 million lives in the first year of vaccination. The study states that without them, nearly three times as many would die in 2021 alone. 78.2% of the deaths prevented were due to the direct effects of the vaccine. The rest are indirect effects, such as reduced disease transmission and fewer hospital collapses.

Great economic inequality. To show that the COVAX program is (partially) working, it should be noted that 6.8 to 7.7 million of these avoided deaths occurred in countries covered by the initiative for rich countries to send vaccines to the poorest. We talked about it on Magnet. Still, vaccine shortages in some countries have led to preventable deaths. Nearly 100 states have failed to meet the WHO’s 40% vaccination target by 2021. This cost about 600,000 lives.

The study authors highlight inequalities in access to vaccines, highlighting that high- and middle-income countries have the highest number of deaths prevented (12.2 million). For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo had to return more than 1.3 million donated doses, and more than 114,000 doses expired due to lack of means of refrigerating them. Doubts about the vaccine caused by misinformation in Nigeria and the US or low acceptance in Yemen and Ukraine are also prominent.

The study has limitations.. It is difficult to know the exact data for all countries. For example, China was excluded from the analysis, as well as very small countries, as the lack of transparency made the investigation more complex. This means that the total number of actual prevented deaths is even higher. Nor did the analysis attempt to deduce how governments would change their measures in the absence of a vaccine (perhaps with their Covid Zero strategy).

The human cost. According to the World Health Organization, about 15 million people died in the first two years of the pandemic. This is almost 2.7 times the number of victims officially reported by individual countries. In the first year alone, the global estimate of excess deaths is 14.9 million. Most (84%) of these are concentrated in Southeast Asia, Europe and America, and 68% occur in only 10 countries.

difficult to measure. The actual number of deaths is also very difficult to know, because official statistics are lower than overestimate estimates due to multiple factors: from delayed and under-reporting to a lack of data in many countries. This is something we rely on at Magnet throughout the pandemic. To fill these gaps, scientists look at overall death rates during the pandemic and compare them to previous years. Even this reference data is sometimes not available in many places, so 100% accuracy is nearly impossible to find.

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