COVID-19 vaccines prevented nearly 20 million deaths in 2021, study says

When looking at”officially recorded COVID-19 fatalities,” COVID vaccinations prevented 14.4 million deaths between the first vaccination on December 8, 2020, and the last immunization on December 8, 2021, says research published by The Lancet on June 23.

When researchers “used excess deaths as an estimate of the true extent of the pandemic” the figure jumps to 19.8 million, according to the research.

This means 63 percent fewer people died around the world (19.8 million out of 31.4 million) during the first year of the COVID-19 vaccine.

“We knew it was going to be a large number, but I did not think it would be as high as 20 million deaths during just the first year,” study co-author Oliver Watson, a Fellow at Imperial College London and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told STAT News.

The biotech sector deserves credit for producing more than 11 billion doses of COVID vaccinations by 2021, according to BIO President and CEO Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath.

“This was the fastest development and scale-up of safe and effective vaccines in history, with 13.9 billion COVID-19 vaccines produced to date,” the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) said last week. “The IP framework has provided the basis for more than 380 voluntary partnerships for COVID-19 vaccines to be set up in record time, 88% of which involve technology transfer.”