infonomena.substack.com
How many lives did COVID-19 vaccines save? A criticism of treating models as reality.
In the diagram below, you can see Our World in Data’s chart, showing actual cumulative U.S. Covid-19 deaths – 350,555 in 2020 and 475,059 in 2021. Our annotations are in pink, blue, and gray. Despite the administration of 520 million vaccine doses in 2021, Covid took 124,504 more American lives in 2021 than 2020. Blowing right past this apparent failure, Lindsey claims, based on the Commonwealth Fund analysis, that vaccines saved 1.087 million Americans from dying in 2021. How can this be?
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Notes -
When we talk about the elderly, the number of lives saved becomes meaningless. We should use QALY or at least months of life extended on average.
Imagine a very old and sick person gets vaccinated for covid and this extends his life expectancy by 2 years. It won't be fully enjoyable life, probably still on wheelchair and full with health crisis but it is better than nothing.
Now we can compare how many QALYs were gained by antihypertensive medicines, by statins etc. and see the actual cost-effectiveness. Covid vaccines probably were quite effective among elderly but as now statins are generic and very cheap (£2 per month on average in the UK) and covid vaccines quite expensive (£50 per dose) I doubt that the gains are greater than for statins. I vaguely remember that statins provide additional life expectancy about 7 months on average. It doesn't sound much but on society's level that's quite impressive.
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