According to researchers, COVID-19 vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in their first year after launch. However, more deaths could have been prevented if the international targets of vaccines had been met.
He became a retired clerk in the UK on 8 December 2020 to receive the first vaccine in the global vaccination campaign. Over the next year, more than 4.3 billion people around the world lined up to be vaccinated.
Oliver Watson of Imperial College London, who spearheaded the new modeling study, said the efforts, despite the persistent injustice faced, prevented casualties to an incredible degree.
Watson said, “Disaster would be the first word that comes to mind” for the result that would occur if vaccines were not available to fight the Corona virus, saying that the findings “reveal how much worse the pandemic could be without vaccines.”
Researchers from 185 countries had to assess that vaccines prevented 4.2 million deaths from COVID-19 in India, 1.9 million in the US, one million in Brazil, 631 thousand in France and 507 thousand in the UK. used data.
According to research published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, an additional 600,000 deaths could have been prevented if the World Health Organization’s 40 percent vaccination target had been met by the end of 2021.
The main finding, 19.8 million COVID-19 deaths averted, is based on estimates of more than normal deaths occurring in the same time frame. The same model, based only on data on reported COVID-19 deaths, concluded that vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths.
London scientists excluded China from the study due to uncertainty about the impact of the pandemic on deaths in China and the country’s huge population.
The study has other limitations as well. The researchers did not include in the study how the virus might have mutated differently in the absence of vaccines. It also didn’t take into account how quarantines or wearing masks might change without vaccines.
Another modeling group took a different approach, estimating that 16.3 million COVID-19 deaths were prevented by vaccines. This study by the Health Metrics and Evaluation Institute in Seattle has not yet been published.
Ali Mokdad from the institute said that in the real world, people wear masks more often when cases increase, “The Delta variant wave in 2021 would have triggered a major precautionary response if there were no vaccines.”
“As scientists, we may disagree on the number, but we all agree that COVID vaccines have saved many lives,” Mokdad said.
Adam Finn, from Bristol Medical School in England, who was not involved in the study, such as Ali Mokdad, said the findings showed both the successes and the shortcomings of the vaccination campaign.
“We were pretty successful this time, saving millions of lives. We could have been more successful, and we should be even more successful in the future,” said Finn.
Funding for the vaccines came from different groups such as the World Health Organization, the UK Medical Research Council, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.