Nearly 20 million lives were saved by COVID-19 vaccines during their first year, but even more deaths could have been prevented if international targets for the shots had been reached, researchers reported Thursday.
On Dec. 8, 2020, a retired shop clerk in England received the first shot in what would become a global vaccination campaign. Over the next 12 months, more than 4.3 billion people around the world lined up for the vaccines.
The effort, though marred by persisting inequities, prevented deaths on an unimaginable scale, said Oliver Watson of Imperial College London, who led the new modeling study.
“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to mind,” Watson said of the outcome if vaccines hadn’t been available to fight the coronavirus. The findings “quantify just how much worse the pandemic could have been if we did not have these vaccines.”
The researchers used data from 185 countries to estimate that vaccines prevented 4.2 million COVID-19 deaths in India, 1.9 million in the United States, 1 million in Brazil, 631,000 in France and 507,000 in the United Kingdom.
An additional 600,000 deaths would have been prevented if the World Health Organization target of 40% vaccination coverage by the end of 2021 had been met, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The main finding — 19.8 million COVID-19 deaths were prevented — is based on estimates of how many more deaths than usual occurred during the time period. Using only reported COVID-19 deaths, the same model yielded 14.4 million deaths averted by vaccines.
The London scientists excluded China because of uncertainty around the pandemic’s effect on deaths there and its huge population.
The study has other limitations. The researchers did not include how the virus might have mutated differently in the absence of vaccines. And they did not factor in how lockdowns or mask wearing might have changed if vaccines weren’t available.
Another modeling group used a different approach to estimate that 16.3 million COVID-19 deaths were averted by vaccines. That work, by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, has not been published.
In the real world, people wear masks more often when cases are surging, said the institute’s Ali Mokdad, and 2021’s delta wave without vaccines would have prompted a major policy response.
“We may disagree on the number as scientists, but we all agree that COVID vaccines saved lots of lives,” Mokdad said.
The findings underscore both the achievements and the shortcomings of the vaccination campaign, said Adam Finn of Bristol Medical School in England, who like Mokdad was not involved in the study.
“Although we did pretty well this time — we saved millions and millions of lives — we could have done better and we should do better in the future,” Finn said.
Funding came from several groups including the WHO; the UK Medical Research Council; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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AP health and science reporter Havovi Todd contributed.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Total Doses Distributed = 762,236,905. Total Doses Administered = 593,739,529. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 259,426,758. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 222,123,223.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, says his COVID-19 recovery is an “example” for the nation on the protection offered by vaccines and boosters.
Speaking during a White House briefing, Fauci, 81, said he began experiencing virus symptoms on June 14 and tested positive a day later. He was prescribed the anti-viral drug paxlovid, which has proven to be highly effective at preventing serious illness and death from COVID-19, on June 15.
“I’m still feeling really quite fine,” Fauci said Thursday, as the administration emphasized the protection offered by vaccines to people of all ages, after the U.S. became the first country in the world to extend vaccine eligibility to children as young as six months.
“I think I’m an example, given my age, of what we’re all talking about today,” Fauci said. “I’m vaccinated. I’m doubly boosted. And I believe if that were not the case, I very likely would not be talking to you looking as well as I look, I think, right now. So all as well with Fauci.”
A lack of clear, concise and consistent messaging about the seriousness of the novel coronavirus in the earliest months of its spread created a false sense of security among Americans that the pandemic would not be serious and resulted in inaction early on across the federal government.
That was the assessment of Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the COVID response coordinator under former President Donald Trump and testified for the first time Thursday before a House panel about her time in the Trump administration.
“It wasn’t just the president, many of our leaders, were using words like ‘we could contain,’ and you cannot contain a virus that cannot be seen,” Birx said. “And it wasn’t being seen because we weren’t testing.”
Birx appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, whose partisan divide was evident throughout the hearing as Democrats focused their attention on missteps made during the Trump administration while Republicans did the same when it came to Democratic-led states such as New York or under the Biden administration, such as when President Joe Biden overstated the efficacy of vaccines by telling Americans in a CNN town hall, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
Much of the hearing focused on concerns Birx had about strategies promoted by Dr. Scott Atlas, who joined the White House as a pandemic adviser in the summer of 2020 and argued that it was all right for low-risk people to get infected with the virus as long as the vulnerable are protected. Birx was asked why she considered that view so dangerous.
“Dr. Atlas’s view was anybody who was not going to have severe disease should be allowed to become infected,” Birx said. The difficulty, she said was the premise that the country could then “magically separate the 50 or 60 million vulnerable Americans from that infection at a high level.”
She said that when Atlas and other officials espoused that view about the virus, it created doubts with the American public.
“It created a sense that anything could be right,” she said.
Birx also said that Atlas’s tenure “destroyed any cohesion in the response of the White House itself.”
To underscore the divide in the White House, the subcommittee released new emails, including from Birx to then-CDC Director Robert Redfield, then FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In the August. 11, 2000, e-mail, Birx described a “very dangerous meeting in the OVAL yesterday,” with a list of concerns. “The conclusion was Dr. Atlas is brilliant and the President will be following his guidance now.,” she wrote. She went on to say she would continue her focus in working with states but doubted her ability to change the president’s mind on what needs to be done, such as strict mask use, expansion of testing, strict social distancing and limiting school re-openings where there was uncontrolled community spread.
Atlas was not a participant in the hearing, but he participated in an extensive interview with the committee staff earlier this year in which he downplayed his role on the White House’s COVID efforts.
“Dr. Birx was responsible for the policies that were implemented previously and also during my time there and also after I left. The entire time, the policies were directly from Dr. Birx to the governors and that never changed,” Atlas said.
Atlas said his role at the White House was to bring information to the president and he was critical of what he called “Birx-Fauci lockdowns” that he described as a failure.
“The elderly people were still dying. The infection was still spreading. It was a failure, and there was enormous harms inflicted on our children and on families by this total broad lockdown,” he told the committee.
A subcommittee report released in the days leading up to the hearing concluded that the Trump administration’s disregard for proven mitigation measures resulted in a federal response that differed little from the implementation of a deliberate herd immunity strategy.
Birx has projected that 130,000 Americans lives could have been saved after the first wave of the pandemic if the federal government had implemented “optimal mitigation across this country.” The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hit 1 million last month.
The European Medicines Agency said Thursday it is recommending the authorization of the coronavirus vaccine made by French pharmaceutical Valneva, making it the sixth shot given the green light in Europe.
The EU drug regulator said in a statement that it had cleared Valneva’s two-dose vaccine for people aged 18 to 50. The main study used to assess Valneva’s vaccine was research in about 3,000 people aged 30 and over; scientists compared it to the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Those results showed Valneva’s vaccine triggered the production of higher levels of antibodies than the AstraZeneca vaccine. The EMA said “the (Valneva) vaccine is as effective at triggering the production of antibodies in people aged between 18 and 29 as it is in people aged 30 years and older.”
Still, the EMA said there were limited data on how effective Valneva’s vaccine might be against the virus’ omicron variant and its subvariants, which are currently fueling surges of cases across Europe. The EMA said the side effects from Valneva’s shot were mostly mild, including aches, nausea and tiredness.
Valneva’s vaccine is made using the same technology used for flu and polio shots. It uses a killed version of the COVID-19 virus, which primes the body to make antibodies against it. The vaccine also contains adjuvants, or ingredients to boost the immune response.
Last year, the British government canceled an agreement to buy 100 million doses from Valneva partly because it was clear the company’s COVID-19 shot wouldn’t be approved by British regulators, according to the health secretary.
Britain was an early backer of the Valneva project, agreeing to invest millions of pounds in a production facility in Scotland as part of a deal announced last September. As part of the contract, the U.K. had agreed to buy 100 million doses of the vaccine, with options for another 90 million.
Despite the government’s cancelation of the agreement, Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency authorized Valneva in April, becoming the first in the world to OK the vaccine.
Austria’s health minister announced Thursday that the country is scrapping a dormant coronavirus vaccine mandate, saying the measure risked polarizing society and could even lead to fewer people getting the shot.
The government announced plans last year requiring all people aged 18 and over to get vaccinated against COVID-19, the first country in Europe to do so. The law took effect in February but lawmakers suspended the mandate before police were due to enforce it in mid-March.
Health Minister Johannes Rauch said the rise of new virus variants had changed citizens’ perception of the effectiveness and necessity of a vaccination, even among those willing to get the shot.
This could deter them from voluntarily getting booster shots that will help curb the outbreak in the fall, he said.
“The vaccine mandate hinders some people who are generally willing to get the shot from taking the booster, the idea being: I’m not going to be told what to do,” said Rauch.
He said current hardships such as inflation and high energy prices, and fears surrounding the war in Ukraine, had contributed to tensions in society.
“We need every millimeter of solidarity and cohesion to cope with the coming months and years,” said Rauch. “And the debate surrounding compulsory vaccination and the hardening of positions over this question tore open rifts and did away with that solidarity.”
