Leveraging the staggered rollout of vaccines, we find that the vaccination campaign across 141 countries averted 2.4 million excess deaths. . . . We also find that an equitable counterfactual distribution of vaccines, with vaccination in each country proportional to its population, would have saved roughly 670,000 more lives.
From an NBER Working Paper.
According to the World Health Organization there have been 6,974,473 COVID deaths to date, worldwide. So, vaccines prevented about 25% of COVID deaths that would have occurred without them.
Someone should re-run the paper's arguments, using the mortality estimates obtained e.g. by The Economist, according to which there were more like 20 million deaths. The number of lives counterfactually saved might be even higher.
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