Without vaccines in Europe, the pandemic would have caused a million more deaths

Every year, a crowded event is held to take stock of the state of research in the field of infectious diseases and clinical microbiology: the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCmid).

As you read these lines, the 2023 edition, which takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark, is drawing to a close.

Among the multitude of topics discussed, there is an oral presentation, corresponding to abstract 01898, which is particularly interesting: three experts belonging to the European section of the World Health Organization have in fact estimated the number of human lives saved up to April 2023 in Europe thanks to vaccines against Sars-CoV-2, and the results are impressive.

With more than 2 million deaths officially attributed to the virus, in Europe, without the administration of the vaccine doses as it happened, there would have been at least a million additional deaths between December 2020 and March 2023, the experts calculate, taking into account the various waves and the different viral variants that have followed (thereby adjusting the estimate for the differences in lethality and also taking into account the variability between the various countries considered).

The estimates, obtained starting from the weekly deaths reported by the vaccine doses administered in 26 countries, were obtained considering three different age groups, i.e. from 25 to 49 years, from 50 to 59 years and from 60 years on, for each country included in the study.

As expected, it turned out that 96 percent of the lives saved are in the over-60 age group; nevertheless, almost 50,000 individuals under the age of 60 would have lost their lives if they had not been vaccinated, in addition to those who died anyway.

According to the calculations made, the first dose was found to be the biggest leap in protectionhaving been responsible for 64 per cent of the lives saved.

In this older age group, the first booster saved the most lives, accounting for nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of lives saved.

A further confirmation has arrived regarding the protective effect against the Omicron variant: despite the vaccines being less effective against it and despite the fact that this variant demonstrates lower lethality, as has long been claimed, also on this page, its high diffusivity has constituted a much greater burden in terms of health and mortality, for which the estimates made in this latest work show that vaccines have saved the greatest number of lives during the Omicron wave, with over half a million deaths avoided .

This last figure is particularly interesting, because it demonstrates the irresponsibility of those messages which, starting from the lower lethality of a viral variant and leveraging on its greater immunoevasiveness (a characteristic which in any case will always be selected when new variants emerge), claim to declare vaccination now unnecessary, or they indirectly induce this thought, because they show the lowest individual risk, forgetting the overall risk for health systems and for society that we run as a population.

In general, scrolling through data such as those highlighted in this latest communication, consistent with many solid previous publications, one would expect that anyone, grateful for the narrow escape, would finally put aside previous hesitations or errors of interpretation; instead, one can rest assured that, faced with the evidence of one’s own factual error, not only individuals, but also newspapers or politicians who have made anti-vaccinism their own distinctive feature will continue to promulgate their poisonous nonsense, even further raising the bar , taking advantage of the fact that the lethality of Sars-CoV-2 in the unvaccinated has fortunately turned out to be well below 100 percent and of the fact that not everyone has been exposed, which allows us to always find an audience already convinced of the uselessness or harmfulness of vaccines.

The technique is simple: there will always be some scholar and a new article published in a scientific journal, useful for launching a new cry of scandal for hidden truths, so as to pass over in silence data such as those just discussed.

In January, for example, a study gave particular breath to No vax, due to the fact that it estimated the number of deaths in the United States from vaccines at 278,000. The CDC had reported only 19,476 reports of deaths after the Covid vaccination in a national database of unverified adverse reactions for the same period, and therefore this scientific publication constituted the “proof” of the global conspiracy to hide the “truth”. The publication, which ended up in the group’s reputable “BMC Infectious Disease” journal natures, however, it happened to be the usual mass of nonsense and methodological errors; so, a week ago she was retracted.

After the cries of denunciation of a supposed censorship (which one? That of wrong arithmetic as in the last retracted work?), the next “fundamental work” of the anti-vaccinists is awaited, that they will have to read something, to avoid running their eyes on the data proving millions of avoided deaths.