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May 16, 2022 - Health

COVID vaccines could have prevented 319K deaths

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Vaccine-preventable COVID-19 deaths per 1 million adults
Data: Brown School of Public Health; Map: Thomas Oide/Axios

Vaccines could have prevented roughly 319,000 COVID-19 deaths between January 2021 and last month, according to a new analysis from researchers at Brown School of Public Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Microsoft AI for Health.

In other words: At least every second person who died from COVID-19 since vaccines became available might have been saved by getting the vaccines, they said.

  • States where the most lives could've been saved by vaccines include West Virginia, Wyoming, Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma, according to a dashboard released by the health organizations.
  • "The vaccine rollout has been both a remarkable success and a remarkable failure," Brown's Stefanie Friedhoff, one of the analysis' authors, told NPR.
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