How effective are the Covid vaccines? Here's some new data:
A team of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the California Department of Public health developed two different data-based models of the course of the Covid pandemic in California in the ten months after vaccines became available. They published their results in the April 22, 2022 edition of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.
Their first model estimated that during the ten months prior to October 16, 2021, Covid vaccinations in California averted 1.52 million infections, 72,930 hospitalizations and 19,430 deaths.
The second model estimated that during those same ten months, vaccinations prevented 1.4 million Covid cases, 84,330 hospitalizations and 22,620 deaths.
The researchers limited themselves to pointing out that these results "can be generalized across the United States." We can take a stab at doing that if we assume that the vaccines averted cases, hospitalizations and deaths at roughly the same rate across the country as they did in California. By the end of the study period, 23,800,846 Californians were fully vaccinated. At that same time 188,902,483 Americans had been fully vaccinated, or 7.94 times the number in California alone.
Multiplying by that factor, the vaccines conservatively averted 11,116,000 Covid cases, 579,064 hospitalizations and 154,036 deaths in the US in the first 10 months of their availability.
On February 25 of this year I posted an OpEdNews article providing a count--based on the actual differences between week-by-week death rates among unvaccinated and vaccinated people--of how many American lives the Covid vaccines had saved to that date.
My estimate was that 545,000 Americans were still alive because they had gotten vaccinated. It's important to note that those only represented lives saved directly by the vaccines, not infections, hospitalizations or deaths averted among the contacts of people who stayed healthy because they were vaccinated.
Similarly, the UCSF researchers note that their estimates only count people whose lives were saved because they were vaccinated--direct lives saved. They point out that many more Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths were doubtlessly averted among the contacts of vaccinated people. "The true numbers are definitely significantly higher," says lead author Sophia Tan, at UCSF.
To get a sense of how just how much higher, we have a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, a century-old private foundation that promotes effective and equitable health care in the US. They used a highly detailed model that, along with many other factors, accounts for contagion, hospitalization and deaths within people's contact networks. Their study provides estimates through March, 2022.
Those researchers estimate that Covid vaccinations have probably prevented more than 66 million infections, more than 17 million hospitalizations and more than 2 million deaths in the United States.
Given the high cost of health care in the US, we shouldn't be surprised that, according to the Commonwealth study, averting those millions of infections, hospitalizations and deaths saved some $900 billion--that's nearly one trillion dollars--in healthcare costs.
As of April 25, 2022, the US has suffered just under one million Covid deaths. If the 219 million Americans who are fully vaccinated had chosen not to, the number of US Covid deaths would have been much higher, perhaps approaching a shocking 3 million.
The Covid pandemic is at low ebb right now, but it has not disappeared. The vaccines are readily available and free. If you're among the one-third of Americans who have not yet gotten vaccinated, it's not too late to protect yourself and the people you are close to.
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