Around 20 million lives around the world were saved thanks to the Covid-19 jabs in the first year of the vaccine programme, according to new estimates. The first ever Covid-19 jab outside a clinical trial was administered in the UK to grandmother Maggie Keenan on December 8, 2020.
Experts set out to estimate the impact in the year after she received her vaccine by assessing information across 185 countries. Researchers, led by academics at Imperial College London, concluded that more deaths were prevented in wealthy countries, with an estimated 12.2 million lives saved in high and upper-middle income countries.
It is estimated that at least 66% of the world’s population have received at least one jab. Overall 19.8 million deaths were prevented in the first year after vaccines were introduced, the new research suggests.
