Lives saved (and money too, for those who don't care about lives)

COVID vaccines have saved over 3 million lives in America. Imagine if we were an actual rational country, and everyone had gotten vaccinated.

Today is the two-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 vaccination (outside clinical trials, yes, don't nitpick), and to mark the occasion, the Commonwealth Fund yesterday released results of a new study finding that the vaccines have prevented 3.2 million deaths, and more than 18.5 million hospitalizations in the US. Eighty percent of the US population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, and more than 655 million doses, including boosters, have been administered in the two years since the vaccine was rolled out.

In addition, the study estimates that without the vaccine, there would have been nearly 120 million more infections, and that the total savings in medical costs from a mostly vaccinated population came to roughly $1.5 trillion.

The study used computer models of how the disease would have progressed without any vaccinations to come up with its estimates, to compare with how the disease actually played out in the US.

Those are just the data on COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that were prevented by the vaccines; if the virus had continued unchecked, the authors also note, the impact on the US healthcare system would also have been far greater, since hospitals and the medical workforce would have been in even worse shape than they already are as a result of the pandemic. The Delta and Omicron waves last winter stressed many hospital system to the point of failure, filling ICUs and requiring some states to put in place "crisis standards of care" that amounted to rationing — which meant that people with other medical emergencies couldn't always get treated.

Link

I'm getting my bivalent booster tomorrow, because I care about myself, my family, and other people, and I'm not going to risk everyone's health and well-being just to "own the libs". Because that would be asinine.