San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Vaccines found to save 20 million lives in first year
Nearly 20 million lives were saved by COVID-19 vaccines during their first year, but even more deaths could have been prevented if international targets for the shots had been reached, researchers reported.
On Dec. 8, 2020, a retired shop clerk in England received the first shot in what would become a global vaccination campaign. Over the next 12 months, more than 4.3 billion people around the world lined up for the shots.
The effort, though marred by persisting inequities, prevented deaths on an unimaginable scale, said Oliver Watson of Imperial College London, who led the new study.
“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to mind,” Watson said of the outcome if vaccines hadn’t been available to fight the coronavirus. The findings “quantify just how much worse the pandemic could have been if we did not have these vaccines.”
The researchers used data from 185 countries to estimate that vaccines prevented 4.2 million COVID-19 deaths in India, 1.9 million in the United States, 1 million in Brazil, 631,000 in France and 507,000 in the United Kingdom.
An additional 600,000 deaths would have been prevented if the World Health Organization target of 40% vaccination coverage by the end of 2021 had been met, according to the study published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The scientists excluded China because of uncertainty around the pandemic’s effect on deaths there and its huge population.
The study has other limitations. The researchers did not include how the virus might have mutated differently in the absence of vaccines. And they did not factor in how lockdowns or mask wearing might have changed if vaccines weren’t available.
Another modeling group used a different approach to estimate that 16.3 million COVID-19 deaths were averted by vaccines. That work, by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, has not been published.
Nora Burlingame, 3, is held by her mother as she gives a fist-bump to nurse Luann Majeed after getting vaccinated Tuesday at a University of Washington Medical Center clinic in Seattle.
of updating their shots — targeting just omicron, or a combination booster that adds omicron protection to the original vaccine. They also tested whether to keep today’s standard dosage — 30 micrograms — or to double the shots’ strength.
In a study of more than 1,200 middle-aged and older adults who’d already had three vaccine doses, Pfizer said both booster approaches spurred a substantial jump in omicron-fighting antibodies.
“Based on these data, we believe we have two very strong omicron-adapted candidates,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement.
Pfizer’s omicron-only booster sparked the strongest immune response against that variant.
But many experts say combination shots may be the best approach because they would retain the proven benefits of the original COVID-19 vaccine while adding new protection against omicron. And Pfizer said a month after people received its combo shot, they had a 9 to 11-fold increase in omicron-fighting antibodies. That’s
more than 1.5 times better than another dose of the original vaccine.
And importantly, preliminary lab studies show the tweaked shots also produce antibodies capable of fighting omicron’s genetically distinct relatives named BA.4 and BA.5, although those levels weren’t nearly as high.
Moderna recently announced similar results from tests of its combination shot, what scientists call a “bivalent” vaccine.
The FDA’s scientific advisers will publicly debate the data on Tuesday.
an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, FBI and South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.
When authorities confronted McDonald after they were alerted to the fake cards last September, she told federal agents, contrary to the evidence, that she had never given anyone a falsified vaccine card, the Justice Department said in a statement.
“The Defendant created a direct risk to the people of South Carolina by creating false vaccine documents for others to use, and she compounded this wrongdoing by lying to federal agents,” U.S. Attorney Corey Ellis said in a statement. “As a registered nurse, she knew better and owed more to her community.”
Her attorney, Jim Griffin, said McDonald has agreed to cooperate and accepted responsibility for her conduct.
McDonald, 53, of Columbia, faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine at her sentencing on September 20.