COVID-19 deaths and the efficacy of the Covid vaccine



The university where I was on faculty for 37 years has one of ten NIH-funded vaccine testing and evaluation units in the US. I vividly recall attending a presentation by the clinical director of our vaccine center in January of 2020 on the then-new SARS-CoV-2 virus. By the summer, our vaccine center became a clinical trial site for the Moderna mRNA vaccine. I immediately enrolled, even though I knew I had a 50% chance of being in the placebo arm (in the event, I was in the vaccine arm, which was obvious on the second jab).

According to Wikipedia, there have been over 7 million Covid-related deaths as of August 2024. To put that in perspective, that’s over a third of the world-wide deaths attributed to World War I (20 million), which by any measure is an immense loss of human life. On the other hand, the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved 2.4 million lives in 141 countries, a tremendous contribution to public health. Of course, more lives could have been saved if the vaccine had reached more people in the poorer nations.

I’ve seen some carping that the vaccines were failures because they didn’t *prevent* infections. Of course, that was never the promise of the vaccines. The goal of the vaccines was to keep people out of the ED and the morgue, and they succeeded overwhelmingly in that goal. As I posted here previously, vaccination also reduces the incidence of long COVID. 

Anyone who claims the COVID-19 pandemic was a “dud” and/or that the vaccines had no effect is ignorant or lying.

https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/covid-vaccine-lives-saved-study/ 

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