Covid vaccines averted 3 million deaths in U.S., according to new study

Rather than modeling population-level effects, the team of researchers from the University of Maryland, York University, and the Yale School of Public Health used a computational model that allowed them to incorporate factors like waning immunity or different age groups’ eligibility for vaccines and boosters into their calculations. Fung noted that adding all of these parameters together creates more statistical uncertainty in the data, meaning that there’s a larger margin for error in the study’s final results. The authors acknowledge this uncertainty by providing “credible intervals” for their calculations — ranges that show, for example, that their estimates for the number of averted deaths would be between 3.1 million and 3.4 million.