Covid-19 vaccines more than halved potential global death toll: Study

19.8m deaths averted in first year after vaccines rolled out, UK researchers say

- Joyce Teo

Vaccinations more than halved the potential global death toll due to Covid-19, as an estimated 19.8 million deaths were averted in the first year after vaccines were introduced, according to a mathematical modelling study published on Thursday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

These reductions were concentrated in high-income countries that relied on their vaccination programmes to relax interventions and allow Sars CoV-2 transmission to increase as they moved into a new stage of the pandemic, the authors said.

The researchers from Imperial College London estimated that 31.4 million people would have died if no one had been jabbed in the first year of vaccination, starting from Dec 8, 2020.

“However, because of vaccination, we estimate that 19.8 million of these lives were saved,” said the lead author, Dr Oliver Watson.

The estimates were based on excess deaths from 185 countries and territories.

China was not included in the analysis owing to its large population and strict lockdown measures, which would have skewed the findings.