Anyone wondering whether Covid-19 vaccines are making a difference to this deadly and persistent pandemic can be in no doubt: they are.
Millions of lives around the world have been saved thanks to the rollout of vaccines that were developed at record speed. Data from several global studies looking at “real world vaccine effectiveness” — which reflects what is really going on as the world continues to battle SARS-CoV-2 — show that in the first year of the vaccination program, 19.8 million out of a potential 31.4 million Covid-19 deaths were prevented worldwide. But this number doesn’t tell the full story in low-income countries, where just over 180,000 deaths were averted. Many more lives could have been saved if vaccines had been distributed more rapidly to many parts of the world and if vaccine uptake could have been strengthened worldwide. Read more here.
