Covid-19 vaccines cut the potential global death toll by more than half in the first year they were available, according to a study published Thursday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The study modeled the spread of the disease in 185 territories and countries and found that without Covid vaccines, 31.4 million people would have died of the disease between December 2020 and 2021. While the pandemic has taken a devastating toll around the globe, with more than 3.5 million deaths since the first vaccine was administered in December 2020, the study estimated that vaccinations also prevented 19.8 million deaths.
“We knew it was going to be a large number, but I did not think it would be as high as 20 million deaths during just the first year,” said Oliver Watson, a Fellow at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and co-first author on the study.
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However, millions more deaths could have been prevented. The team found that one in five of the deaths that occurred due to Covid-19 in low-income countries could have been prevented if the World Health Organization’s global vaccine targets were met.
The team applied a Covid transmission model, incorporating what we know now about the disease and vaccines, to three situati …