A surprising new study found that in the two years since nurse Sandra Lindsay became the first person in the U.S. to receive a COVID-19 vaccine outside of clinical trials, 3 million American lives have been saved because of the shots.
The study was released Tuesday by the Commonwealth Fund, a healthcare policy foundation that claims credit for laying the groundwork for Obamacare and often offers "a left-of-center perspective on state intervention in the medical system and the power of public health authorities," according to Influence Watch.
The study says the U.S. has administered 655 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines and that 80% of the population has received at least one dose. This cumulative effect prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and more than 3 million additional deaths, stated the researchers.
According to STAT News, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 1 million Americans died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began. But the new study results show that the country could have fared far worse without the vaccines, relying solely on natural immunity acquired through infection by the virus.
Without vaccines, the researchers said the country would have experienced four times as many deaths, 1.5 times more infections, and 3.8 times more hospitalizations since December 2020. The vaccines also saved the country $1 trillion in additional medical costs.
The conclusion of the study is that the money spent on vaccines was definitely “worth our money as taxpayers,” said Isaac Chun-Hai Fung, associate professor of epidemiology at Georgia Southern University. “We pay for the vaccination campaign and it works. It saves us money and it saves lives.”
Researchers from the University of Maryland, York University, and the Yale School of Public Health used a computational model for the study that incorporated factors like waning immunity or different age groups’ eligibility for vaccines and boosters into their calculations. Fung, who was not involved in the study, pointed out that this form of research includes too many parameters and creates a large margin of error in the results. The authors acknowledged this potential for uncertainty and said that their estimates for averted deaths would be between 3.1 and 3.4 million, says STAT News.
‘I was struck by just how many lives were saved,” said Alison Galvani, who was the lead author of the study, and director of Yale’s Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis. “If you look at the time frame since the last two years, when the vaccination period was initiated, the vaccine has saved many more lives than have been lost from COVID.”
The study affirms that the vaccines are effective against severe illness and death. Fung says that the study’s results show that prevention helps protect people with minimal interruptions to their lives. It’s an important message to the public and to politicians to stave off other infectious diseases, such as the flu, he said.
“We should continue to support preventative medicine,” Fung stated. “Not just COVID vaccinations, but other kinds of vaccination, because it’s keeping people healthy, they can go to work, which keeps the economy running.”