How many lives has the COVID vaccine saved? Should I be vaccinated?

I decided to do the math myself.

Sources:

I pulled COVID deaths by age group from the CDC:

Provisional COVID-19 Deaths by Sex and Age | Data | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

I pulled the estimated population size from the US census:

National Demographic Analysis Tables: 2020

What is the COVID-19 Death Rate by Age Group?

To get this data, I used the COVID deaths from the CDC and then grouped the census data by age in the same way the CDC does to track deaths.

Now I could divide COVID deaths by the population of that age group (Note: I used the “all COVID-19 deaths — including Pneumonia — “ this means that my data may be overly optimistic for the vaccine).

Here are those death rates by age group:

What impact does the vaccine have on the death rate?

Now we have a baseline death rate per age group, let’s now calculate the impact the vaccine has on that death rate. To do so, let’s look at some studies which examine the change in death rate:

Two doses of Pfizer vaccine reduces risk of death by 97 per cent

Unvaccinated people 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19, CDC study shows

So between those two, the vaccine reduces your risk of dying somewhere between 1x to 11x. Let’s see the difference in the deaths per 100k across those efficacy rates.

How many lives has/will the COVID-19 vaccine save?

Let’s take a 1x/5x/11x efficacy rate and determine how many lives the vaccine has saved across those age groups:

So with that, the vaccine has/will save somewhere between 350k and 642k lives in the US. But that comes with the major caveat that 90%+ of those lives saved came from those older that 55 years with 76%+ of those coming from those older than 65 years.

In addition, only 3.6% of the “lives saved” comes from 58% of the population (Ages 0–44).

What’s the risk/reward associated with taking the vaccine?

For that, let’s turn to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System AKA “VAERS.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get age-related data for this. So this will be generalized for all ages.

For my data, I used this site which gives a nice summary of the original VAERS data:

VAERS Summary for COVID-19 Vaccines through 10/1/2021

Here is the overall data (as of Oct 2021):

A total of 16,310 deaths have been reported as associated with a COVID vaccination.

Now let’s look at the risk of the vaccine by taking the total number of vaccine related deaths divided by the total number of vaccinations given in the US. Let’s also compare that to the regular Flu vaccine:

So your chance of dying from the vaccine itself is 1 in 30,879 or 0.00324% percent.

Let’s go back and compare the death rates of COVID among different age groups to determine whether the risk of dying from COVID is greater than the risk of dying from the vaccine.

The difference column above displays your chance of dying from the COVID vaccine vs. COVID. If it is equal to 1, that means that there is an equal chance of dying from either COVID or the vaccine. If it is greater than 1, that means that your chance of dying from the vaccine is that much greater than COVID. If it is less than 1, that means that your chance of dying from COVID is greater than taking the vaccine.

Now I have to caveat this data again with two things, 1) a reminder that the VAERS data did not include an impact on age ranges and 2) a Harvard study found that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”. Thus, both of these things probably increase the chances that the vaccine may be worse than COVID for certain age groups.

The final calculation involves determining the risk of the vaccine alongside the efficacy of it. Taking the vaccine introduces you to a risk of death that is not applied to those not taking the vaccine. To do this, we take the improved average death rate efficacy (1x/5x/11x) from taking the vaccine and we add the risk of 1 in 30,879 of dying from the vaccine itself.

From this chart, you can observe that for those ages 0–24, their chance of dying is greater from taking the vaccine than from COVID. As an example, a 5 year old is 8.73 times more likely to die from the vaccine than to die from COVID.

I hope this data helps you to determine whether or not you should be vaccinated.

Want to read more?

I just published another post on the math behind vaccine mandates. Check it out here: https://medium.com/@shinghi/187-216-million-people-in-the-us-are-vaccinated-2fb6be97fe77