Here are the fake news on vaccines and variants

Why do we get infected anyway, they say.

Because the virus changes so much, they say.

Because it spreads anyway, they say.

Now, social bar chatter is one thing, numbers and analysis is another.

Scientists at Yale University asked themselves a simple question: can we estimate how many deaths were avoided thanks to the vaccination campaign, as it was conducted and still incomplete, in the US?

To assess the impact of the vaccination program in the United States, the researchers expanded their age-stratified, agent-based model of Covid-19 to include the transmission dynamics of the Alpha, Gamma, and Delta variants in addition to the original Wuhan- 1. Parameters of the model included US population demographics, an empirically determined network of contacts that takes into account pandemic mobility patterns and age-specific risks of severe health outcomes due to Covid-19. The model incorporated data on daily vaccine doses administered in the United States. The vaccine efficacy against infection and symptomatic and severe disease for the different vaccine types – for each variant and for the time since vaccination – was drawn from published estimates. The model was calibrated on national incidence data between October 1, 2020 and June 28, 2021 and validated with hospitalization and death trends during the same period.

Researchers evaluated the impact of the vaccination campaign by simulating epidemiological trajectories in two counterfactual scenarios: no vaccination schedule or a vaccination rate over time reduced to half the actual rate. For each of the scenarios, the epidemiological results of total infections, hospitalizations and deaths were compared with the current pandemic situation in the United States under vaccination between December 12, 2020 and June 28, 2021.

The results are in the figures below. Thanks to vaccines, in a few months and only in the US, Yale researchers estimate that:

1) over 270,000 deaths were averted;

2) over 1.2 million hospitalizations were avoided;

3) over 25 million infections have been averted.

Not even any new worse variants of the delta can cancel this result; and it can still be improved by increasing vaccination starting with the most vulnerable groups.

While waiting for the first drugs and new generation vaccines, let's look at the facts and stop listening to scoundrels.

Sources:

https://news.yale.edu/…/us-vaccination-campaign…

Galvani, Seyed M. Moghadas, and Eric C. Schneider, Deaths and Hospitalizations Averted by Rapid US Vaccination Rollout (Commonwealth Fund, July 2021). https://doi.org/10.26099/wm2j-mz32