The Evidence-Free Claim that the Covid Vaccines Saved 20 Million Lives is Easily Debunked

If you asked a man on the Clapham omnibus how many lives the vaccines ‘saved’, I’d be surprised if he has any idea at all. If, by chance he does have an inkling he’ll probably quote the 20 million claim repeated ad nauseum in the media over the past few years.

If you went on to ask him how many people died across the globe in any one year, then I very much doubt he would have any idea at all. Until I looked into this I had no clue either, so why should our bus passenger know? This is how the claim that 20 million lives were saved by the vaccines gets credence: no one has any context in which to frame the number.

This article puts some context around the claim, showing you where it comes from and why it’s wrong.

Across the world about 60 million people die each year. A much quoted paper, authored by a bunch of Imperial College academics and published in the Lancet in September 2022, claimed that the vaccines saved 19.8 million lives during the 12 month period starting December 8th 2020, the date the first Covid vaccine was injected into the arm of a member of the public.

Rarely has this figure ever been challenged. We see it quoted on the BBC, at the Hallett Inquiry, in Parliament, by broadcasters and leaders across the world. Yet it’s complete nonsense.

Taken from Our World in Data, Figure 1 shows global deaths per year from 2015 to 2023. In the absence of Covid and the disastrous lockdowns, in 2021 there would have been about 60 million deaths. However, because of Covid and lockdowns there were almost 70 million deaths. 10 million extra deaths. I have my doubts about the numbers ascribed to Covid but let’s leave that to one side for now; it’s the ‘saved’ lives rather than the lost lives we’re looking at.

Imperial’s claim is that, in the absence of vaccines, deaths would have been 19.8 million higher, taking the total to about 90 million deaths.

These figures are for the global population as a whole, but let’s break it down a bit and ask in which parts of the world were these 19.8 million lives saved by the vaccines? Figure 2 gives us some clues.

Year in year out, about 55% of global deaths occur in Asia and getting on for 20% of deaths happen in Africa. So surely, most of the saved lives must have occurred on these two continents.

Of course, to have been fortunate enough to have your life saved by the vaccines, you had to have been injected with the thing. In fact, to be fully protected you had to have two, or was it three, or maybe four. Possibly five? Or, even six? But, to stay on the conservative side, I’ve assumed one dose was good enough to save a life.

Having had your vaccine you had to wait for it to take effect. As we’ve known for a few years now, initially the vaccines seem to encourage rather than discourage infection, certainly in the early days. Also, Covid from the date of infection takes about a month to kill you (in the very rare event that it does kill you). That being the case, if we’re looking at deaths up to December 8th 2021, we’re really only interested in people who were vaccinated prior to November 8th 2021.

By November 8th 2021, globally only 51.2% of the world’s adult population had had at least one dose of vaccine. This must mean that Imperial’s 19.8 million saved lives can only have come from the 51.2% vaccinated.

But of course, while by the end of the critical period only 51.2% had been vaccinated, the equally important question is how many were being vaccinated as the year elapsed?

Let’s break the year down into two halves. Pre-June 8th and post June 8th. Given that about 70 million people died across the whole year it’s reasonable to assume 35 million died in each half. For the vaccine to have saved any lives in the first half of the year, an individual would need to have been vaccinated by May 8th 2021. However, by this date (as you can see in Figure 3) only 16.4% of the population had received their first vaccine dose. It follows that nearly all the ‘vaccine saved’ lives must have occurred in the 2nd half of the year.

So, rather than 35 million lives being lost in the second half of 2021 we’re led to believe that in the absence of vaccines, well over 50 million would have been lost! With those extra deaths coming from less than half the population in just half a year.

Figure 4 puts the ‘saved’ lives in context of ‘Covid’ deaths. Again, believe Imperial if you like, but to do so you have to accept that rather than the 5.32 million lives lost to Covid up to December 8th 2021 as OWID data shows, over 25 million lives would have been lost. Or, to put it simply, 80% of all projected Covid deaths would have to have been saved in 2021, despite only 50% of the population having been vaccinated by the end date, and only 16% having been vaccinated with even one dose by the halfway stage of the year.

Imperial appears to ignore any benefit that came from natural immunity and robust immune systems which, in 99.8% of ‘cases’, saw off the virus, with or without the help of a vaccine.

Finally, let’s just see what proportion of UK Covid deaths were of the unvaccinated; it seems reasonable to assume that the results in the UK would have been replicated elsewhere, but we only have these data for the UK. Happily, the UKHSA Weekly Vaccine Surveillance Reports are awash with useful data.

Let’s take the report for week 13 of 2022. Of the 2,368 deaths in the four week period covered by the analysis, 91% were of vaccinated people. Coincidentally, about 91% of the UK adult population had completed their vaccination course by then. The proportion of deaths amongst the unvaccinated was the same as the proportion of unvaccinated people in the population.

When we look at ‘real-world’ data it’s difficult to see that the vaccinations made any difference at all. The idea that total all-cause global deaths would have been a third higher in their absence is laughable.

Maybe if the Hallett Inquiry actually inquired into the data rather than taking them on trust it might have achieved something of value rather than just cheerleading for the ‘establishment’.