Vaccines Save Lives

The coordinated and rapid COVID-19 vaccination campaign launched in the United States in late 2020 saved some 279,000 lives through July 2021 and prevented 1.25 million hospitalizations. The gains, however, could be swiftly reversed by the highly transmissible delta variant, which has the poten-tial to unleash a surge of new cases among the millions of people in the United States who remain unvaccinated.

Alison Galvani, the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology and the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at YSPH, led the study to gauge how effective the vaccines have been in saving lives. The graph on the left shows the death toll with no vaccines. The graph on the right forecasts the death toll with a vaccination rate of 50%. The study was published by The Commonwealth Fund.