Commentary: Why Covid-19 vaccines are a freaking miracle: speed, saved lives

Why Covid-19 vaccines are a freaking miracle The pandemic has been catastrophic. But consider something that may have escaped you: You have witnessed — and you are a beneficiary of — a freaking miracle. Helen Branswell STAT

Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s easy to lament all that has come to pass. The devastating losses. The upending of what we regarded as normal ways of life. The sheer relentlessness of it all.

But let’s stop for a moment and consider something else that may have escaped you: You have witnessed — and you are a beneficiary of — a freaking miracle.

That miracle is the development, testing, manufacturing, and global distribution of Covid vaccines. ...

Yes, the global rollout has been shamefully inequitable, with low-income countries having to wait far too long to be able to protect their citizens. Sub-Saharan African countries, in particular, still struggle to access and distribute vaccine.

But at least 55% of the people inhabiting this planet have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. In affluent parts of the world, anybody who believes in the protective powers of vaccines has had the opportunity to be vaccinated for months now. (The sole exception: children under the age of 5, for whom the vaccines are not yet authorized.) And it isn’t just wealthy countries. Colombia, Morocco, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Mongolia, and Tonga have fully vaccinated about the same proportion of their populations — roughly 64% — as has the United States.

What has been accomplished in the 25 months since Chinese scientists first shared the genetic sequence of the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 virus has defied the predictions of the most optimistic prognosticators.

“In one year, half the species vaccinated — wow!” said Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, referring to the period after which vaccines started to become available. He has been marveling on his well-followed Twitter feed about how lucky the world got with Covid vaccines; he calls them “an extraordinary human achievement.”

Topol was among the skeptics in early March of 2020 when Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told a Senate committee that it would take at least 12 to 18 months to develop a Covid vaccine. “I thought it was a fantasy. Total fantasy,” he told STAT in a recent interview.

Eight months after Fauci made that prediction, the United States started vaccinating with Pfizer and BioNTech’s messenger RNA vaccine, and a week later, with Moderna’s mRNA vaccine. At 18 months, the outside edge of Fauci’s estimate, the U.S. had already administered nearly 400 million doses of vaccine. Roughly 56% of the population was fully vaccinated by that point and administration of third doses had already begun.

True, the mRNA vaccines haven’t lived up to their initial billing, when they were shown to block roughly 95% of all infections. Over time, that level of protection against all infections declines. Still, they have fundamentally altered the threat SARS-2 poses. Most people who have received three doses are shielded from serious disease and death, even in the face of Omicron, which is so different from the vaccine strain some experts are puzzled at why protection against severe disease remains so strong.

Consider for a moment what might have happened without these vaccines.

According to modeling conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, 1.1 million additional Americans would have died from Covid — and that estimate was made based on data from before the massive Omicron wave that has swept across the country in past two months. ...