As bad as the past 18 months have been, they would have been worse without vaccines—perhaps about 2.7 times worse
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskTo calculate the number of lives saved by vaccines, researchers at Imperial College London needed to estimate how many people would have died without the jabs. They simulated this scenario using an epidemiological model, which calculates the shares of the population that are susceptible to a disease; get exposed; get infected; die or recover; and are vulnerable to reinfection.
The authors then used this model to predict how many additional deaths would have occurred during the year starting on December 8th 2020—the day of the first jab—if no vaccines had been given, but all other factors remained the same. Excluding countries with tiny populations and China, where our excess-mortality figures are highly uncertain, the answer was 19.1m- 20.4m, 170% more than our estimate of the actual death toll during this period.
However, these calculations rely on a tenuous foundation. Because the authors could not obtain breakdowns of vaccine recipients by age group for the entire world, they assumed that all countries vaccinated their oldest residents first. In Africa, where just 3.5% of people are aged at least 65, this implies that a mere 5% vaccination rate would be enough to protect the bulk of the continent’s most vulnerable people.
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