The benefits of large scale covid-19 vaccination
Christopher Dye
Abstract
The benefits of large scale covid-19 vaccination New evidence confirms that fewer people die in better vaccinated communities Christopher Dye professor of epidemiologyThe first covid-19 vaccines were administered under emergency use authorisation in December 2020, just one year into the pandemic, a "miracle" of pharmaceutical innovation that has saved an estimated million lives or more in the US alone. 1 2 The authorisation was given on the basis of safety and efficacy in randomised controlled trials, which found that immunisation with Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines protected a remarkably high percentage (>90%) of recipients from developing symptomatic infection and, to a lesser extent, from asymptomatic infection too.In other words, when tested against the SARS-CoV-2 variants prevailing in 2020 and early 2021, these novel covid-19 vaccines could stop the great majority of infections from causing illness and help to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2.But could vaccination prevent infection and illness on a large scale, outside the controlled environment of clinical trials?A linked study by Suthar and colleagues (