COVID-19 vaccinations averted 2.5 million deaths, according to a new global modeling study.
Some 13.6 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccines were administered around the world from December 2020 through late 2024.
For every 5,400 doses of the vaccines administered, one death was prevented, Dr. John Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University, and his co-authors said in the paper.
The researchers took estimates of the COVID-19 infection fatality rate and vaccine effectiveness against mortality and plugged them into models to try to figure out how many deaths vaccination prevented. Assumptions included that all people, absent vaccination, would have become infected and that the vaccine effectiveness started at 75 percent and went down to 50 percent following the appearance of the Omicron virus variant.
The researchers said the model showed that vaccinations averted 2.5 million deaths. Nearly 90 percent were among people 60 years of age and older, because of their higher infection fatality rate and higher likelihood of receiving a vaccine early on, prior to being infected.
Children and others aged 19 and under accounted for just 0.01 percent of the lives saved, with adults aged 20 to 29 accounting for only another 0.07 percent.
Previous modeling has pegged COVID-19 vaccines as having a greater impact on death prevention, such as a 2024 paper that estimated they had prevented 1.6 million deaths in Europe from December 2020 to March 2023.
“Estimates in this study are substantially more conservative than previous calculations focusing mostly on the first year of vaccination, but they still clearly demonstrate a major overall benefit from COVID-19 vaccination during the years 2020-2024,” Ioannidis and his co-authors wrote.
“Most benefits in lives and life-years saved were secured for a portion of older persons, a minority of the global population.”
The Journal of the American Medical Association published the study on July 25.
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. They said they have received funding from several sources, including the European Union.
Limitations of the paper, the authors said, included uncertainty surrounding vaccine effectiveness.
The authors also did not try to factor in deaths caused by vaccines because, they said, available data indicate the number of those deaths is much smaller than those prevented by vaccines.
Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology in Yale School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, told The Epoch Times in an email that even if the estimates in the paper are accurate, it is missing data on deaths caused by the vaccines.
“The analysis estimates 2.5 million deaths averted worldwide, or in the U.S., with about 4 percent of the world population, about 100,000 deaths averted,” said Risch, who was not involved in the research. “It would not be unrealistic for 100,000 U.S. deaths to have been caused by the vaccines; VAERS reports about 38,000, and that number is likely to be an appreciable undercount.”
People in the United States who suffer problems after vaccination, as well as their providers and families, are encouraged to report the issues to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
“Thus, this study does not demonstrate that the vaccines were more beneficial than harmful in terms of mortality,” Risch said.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert with the University of California–San Francisco, said in a commentary also published by the Journal of the American Medical Association that the study proved correct the ideas some experts forwarded during the pandemic, including that vaccines were important for older people and that children faced little risk of severe complications from COVID-19.
“We should have focused our messaging more on older individuals to get vaccinated in the U.S., especially with the booster campaign, as recommending boosters for children down to the age of 6 months was an outlying position for the U.S. to take,” she wrote.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, until recently, had recommended that all individuals from age 6 months receive a COVID-19 vaccine annually, regardless of prior vaccination or infection.
Under orders from U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC recently stopped recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.
The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, has limited new approvals for COVID-19 vaccines to the elderly and younger people with underlying health conditions that can increase the risk of severe COVID-19.
Gandhi said that moving forward, narrower recommendations for COVID-19 vaccination “should help increase the trust in public health.”