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Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Are COVID-19 Vaccines Safe and Effective?
"We are emerging from one of the darkest years in our nation's history into a summer of hope and joy, hopefully," declared President Joe Biden at a press conference on July 6, 2021. "We're closer than ever to declaring our independence from this deadly virus." The cause for his optimism was the fact that more than 182 million Americans had received at least one shot of the new COVID-19 vaccines, including nearly 90 percent of seniors and 70 percent of adults over the age of 27. That 70 percent figure was significant because early in the pandemic many epidemiologists had suggested that was immunological threshold at which a population might achieve herd immunity. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficiently large portion of a population is immune to a disease either via vaccination or infection, making it difficult for the disease to continue to spread. Biden did cautiously note the emergence of the new more highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus but asserted that "the good news is that our vaccinations are highly effective." He added, "If you're vaccinated, you're protected." Biden was speaking nearly a year and a half after his predecessor, Donald Trump, had declared a national state of emergency over the novel coronavirus outbreak on March 13, 2020. Three days later, Trump's White House issued the President's Coronavirus Guidelines for America that, among other things, advised governors in states with evidence of community transmission to close schools, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues. On May 15, 2020, Trump launched Operation Warp Speed to rapidly produce COVID-19 vaccines. Relying on the amazing success of Operation Warp Speed, Biden was calling for the end of pandemic lockdowns and hailing the advent of a "summer of freedom." In earlier articles on the fifth anniversary of Trump's national emergency, we have considered whether face masks worked, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as COVID-19 treatments, and how many Americans died of the infection. Sticking to recent peer-reviewed science and setting aside the political question of what the government should do with the information, let's turn now to the question: What have researchers learned about the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines? Initial phase III trial results from November 2020 suggested that, after two doses, new mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer were about 95 percent effective in protecting against infection from COVID-19. A March 2021 real-world study involving health care, first responders, and essential workers bolstered those findings. Just as the national inoculation campaign began in December 2020, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, was predicting that the U.S. could achieve herd immunity by "the end of the second quarter of 2021." Achieving herd immunity depends upon vaccines and natural infection creating durable long-term protection against reinfection (e.g., measles, smallpox, and polio). The clinical trials showed that the initial protection afforded by the new COVID-19 vaccines was outstanding but being short-term the trials did not have the power to determine how long that protection against infection might last. Early on, some other researchers questioned the possibility of achieving COVID-19 herd immunity via vaccination and/or natural infection. In a September 2020 preprint(subsequently published in Nature in January 2021), a team of Australian immunologists sought to determine how COVID-19 immunity might evolve. Noting that protective antibodies waned in the first 2–3 months following infection by four known common cold coronaviruses, they suspected that that would also be the case for the novel COVID-19 coronavirus. "Our study suggests SARS-CoV-2 immunity after infection is likely to be transiently protective at a population level," they concluded. An April 2021 article in PLoS Pathogens by an immunologist at the NIAID similarly concluded from experience with the serial reinfection by four common cold coronaviruses that "COVID-19 herd immunity is a pipe dream." (Recent research speculates that the Russian Flu pandemic of the late 19th century might actually have been caused by an outbreak of one the now endemic common cold coronaviruses.) By March 2022, Fauci and his colleagues acknowledged "the concept of classical herd immunity may not apply to COVID-19" in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. "Living with COVID-19 is best considered not as reaching a numerical threshold of immunity, but as optimizing population protection without prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives," they concluded. Population protection, among other things, now involves inoculations updated much like seasonal flu vaccines to boost waning antibodies and to counter emerging variants of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Ultimately, Biden's 2021 "summer of freedom" turns out to have been a fond but illusory hope of a permanent respite from COVID-19. Given this reality, current COVID-19 vaccines are now primarily designed to prevent severe disease and death rather than infection. COVID-19 vaccines and boosters have proved to be highly effective in preventing severe cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Recent research in The Lancet calculates that COVID-19 vaccinations between December 2020 and March 2023 saved approximately 1.6 million lives in Europe. A 2024 Brookings Institution report suggests "the delivery of vaccines to a substantial majority of the American population by mid-2021 saved close to 800,000 American lives relative to what would have occurred had vaccines not been developed." In 2023, a team of researchers associated with Harvard University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distressingly estimated that "at least 232,000 deaths" in the U.S. "could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults during the 15 months [May 30, 2021 to September 3, 2022] had they been vaccinated with at least a primary series." Let's focus on the mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer since they account for the vast majority of COVID-19 inoculations in the United States. In reporting the results from their Phase III clinical trials in November 2020, both Pfizer and Moderna chronicled relatively few transient side effects, which were mostly mild and moderate. These included fatigue, headache, and pain at the injection site. As reassuring as those results were, the rollout of vaccines to tens of millions of people would likely uncover other side effects. In the spring of 2021, women began reporting prolongation of their menstrual cycles after receiving mRNA vaccinations. Subsequent studies confirmed this side effect but concluded that it was temporary and had no identifiable effect on fertility. As the number of vaccinations increased, reports emerged in the summer of 2021 that after getting their second mRNA inoculation, several young males had experienced a type of inflammation of the heart called myocarditis. Understandably, parents found these reports alarming. Fortunately, subsequent research has been more reassuring. A September 2024 review in the journal NPJ Vaccines reports that the risk of myocarditis is about six times greater for those who are infected with COVID-19 than for those who are vaccinated. A February 2025 article in the European Heart Journal compared patients who experienced post-vaccine myocarditis to those who experienced post-COVID-19 and conventional myocarditis. The researchers found that post-vaccine myocarditis patients were less likely to be hospitalized and experienced fewer cardiovascular events. In January 2023, Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson asserted that a number of young athletes were dropping dead shortly after getting COVID-19 injections. Carlson claimed, "Since the vax campaign began, there have been more than 1,500 total cardiac arrests in those [European sports] leagues and two-thirds of those were fatal," reported the Associated Press. This claim was widely debunked shortly thereafter. More recently, a November 2023 study in Sports Health of 1,229 vaccinated U.S. Olympic athletes found that none had died of sudden cardiac arrest or experienced myocarditis. A February 2025 cardiology research letter in JAMA Network compares sudden cardiac arrest and death rates among young competitive athletes before and during the pandemic. "This cohort study found no increase in SCA/SCD [sudden cardiac arrest/sudden cardiac death] in young competitive athletes in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that reports asserting otherwise were overestimating the cardiovascular risk of COVID-19 infection, vaccination, and myocarditis," conclude the authors. What does recent research tell us about COVID-19 vaccine safety more generally? The most comprehensive analysis of the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is the cohort study of 99 million vaccinated individuals published in April 2024 in Vaccine. The researchers confirmed that the incidences of previously identified rare safety signals following COVID-19 vaccination were quite low. "What we take away, is that the Covid-19 vaccination campaigns have been very effective in preventing severe disease," explained study co-author epidemiologist Anders Hviid to SciCheck. "The few serious side effects that we have observed in this and other studies have been rare." A September 2024 analysis in Vaccine of the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine safety surveillance system bolstered this conclusion and found that "the comprehensive federal vaccine monitoring efforts have provided robust data supporting the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. After the administration and monitoring of more than 676 million doses in U.S. residents, serious AEs [adverse events] were rarely observed following vaccination." Upshot: The promise of vaccinated COVID-19 herd immunity has proved illusory. The coronavirus is now an endemic respiratory illness, much like seasonal influenza. The good news is that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines considerably outweigh their risks. The post Are COVID-19 Vaccines Safe and Effective? appeared first on
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
How Many Americans Have Died of COVID-19?
This week marks five years since March 13, 2020, the day President Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency over the novel coronavirus outbreak. By that date, only 57 Americans had died of COVID-19 and 1,645 had been diagnosed with the virus. Three days later, the White House issued the President's Coronavirus Guidelines for America. Among other things, the guidelines advised Americans to avoid bars, restaurants, shopping trips, and social visits. They also recommended that governors in states with evidence of community transmission should close schools, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues. By then, the death toll had risen to 102. Sticking to peer-reviewed science and setting aside the political question of what the government should do with this information, what do we know now about how deadly the pandemic was? On Monday and yesterday, we looked at what researchers have discovered over the past five years about the efficacy of facial masking for protection against COVID-19 and the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for treating coronavirus infections. Next, we'll discuss what researchers have determined about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Today, we look at estimates of how many Americans have died of COVID-19. Some initial projections were frightening. On March 16, 2020, a team of epidemiological modelers associated with the Imperial College London published an alarming study calculating that 2.2 million Americans would die of COVID-19 if measures to stem the spread of the virus were not taken soon. A year later, a retrospective article in The Lancet: Microbe noted that "this information became foundational in decisions to implement physical distancing and adherence to other public health measures because it established the upper boundary for any worst-case scenarios." On March 18, 2020, I asked: Are we battling an unprecedented pandemic or panicking at a computer-generated mirage? Others expressed more sanguine views. For example, Elon Musk bet $1 million with his (former) friend neuroscientist Sam Harris in March 2020 that there wouldn't be as many 35,000 cases (never mind deaths) of COVID-19 in the United States. In an interview with Reason, New York University law professor Richard Epstein stood by his March 16, 2020, article (since removed) from the Hoover Institution, in which he asserted the total number of deaths from COVID-19 globally would top out under 50,000 and that the United States we would see "about 500 deaths at the end." In an effort to gauge the pandemic's toll, various researchers early on tried to nail down the infection fatality rate for the illness—that is, the percentage of infected individuals expected to die. At the beginning of the pandemic, no one knew crucial information, such as how fast the virus could spread, what percentage of infected people would remain asymptomatic, and whether they could transmit the virus to more vulnerable individuals. Initial infection fatality rates ranged widely. For example, an April 11, 2020, study headed by Stanford physician Jay Bhattacharya (now a nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health) calculated an infection fatality rate of 0.12–0.2 percent. This suggested that COVID-19 was not much more deadly than seasonal flu. This contrasts with the Lancet study, which projected a 0.9 percent infection fatality rate from COVID-19 infections. These figures compare with the estimated U.S. infection fatality rate of 0.64 percent for the 1918 influenza pandemic. Calculating deaths from epidemics takes years. More than 100 years later, estimates for the number of deaths stemming from the 1918 influenza pandemic globally still range from 17 to 100 million. So, keep in mind that COVID-19 death counts will still be contested for years to come. In addition to tracking deaths attributed to COVID-19, researchers aim to account for those missed by formal diagnoses by calculating excess deaths. Excess deaths are typically defined as the number of deaths during a particular period above the usual, expected number of deaths under normal conditions. A February 2024 article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculated excess deaths between March 2020 and August 2022, concluding that around 1.2 million Americans had died of COVID-19. A January 2025 analysis in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Statistics in Society Series A calculated excess pandemic mortality in the United States for 2020 and 2021 at 920,731. Interestingly, Stanford biostatistician John Ioannidis, a skeptic of worst-case COVID-19 pandemic claims, and his colleagues calculated in a December 2023 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article that the U.S. suffered 1,220,295 excess deaths between 2020 and 2023. Notably, they also calculated that the U.S. actually experienced 3,456 fewer than expected deaths of Americans aged 14 and under during that period. Considering that all of these calculations use data from 2023 or earlier, they suggest that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's current count of 1,225,281 American deaths from COVID-19 and related causes is somewhat conservative. As a side note, several practitioners of the dismal science calculate in their March 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research study that the approximately 1.4 million excess deaths among Americans aged 25 and older between 2020 and 2023 have reduced the future outlays of Social Security by about $156 billion. What have researchers learned about the infection fatality rate for COVID-19? The picture remains hazy. A rough calculation, assuming that 80 percent of Americans have had a bout of COVID-19, suggests an infection fatality rate of 0.45 percent. A June 2024 study in Infectious Disease Modelling calculated the median pre-vaccination rate for the U.S. at 0.214 percent. This is close to the rate reported by Bhattacharya and his colleagues back in 2020. The upshot: Since Trump's COVID-19 national emergency declaration, COVID-19 has either been the underlying cause of or contributed to the deaths of some 1.3 million Americans. The post How Many Americans Have Died of COVID-19? appeared first on
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Do Face Masks Work?
This week marks five years since March 13, 2020, the day President Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency over the novel coronavirus outbreak. The White House issued the President's Coronavirus Guidelines for America three days later. Among other things, the guidelines advised Americans to avoid bars, restaurants, shopping trips, and social visits. They also said that governors in states with evidence of community transmission should close schools, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues. Sticking to peer-reviewed science, and setting aside the political question of what the government should do with the information, what do we know now about the ways people tried to protect themselves from the virus? Over the next few days we'll look at several measures—ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, the vaccines—as well as the matter of how many Americans died of COVID infections. Today we'll tackle face coverings. Early in the pandemic, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci notoriously announced on 60 Minutes that Americans "should not be walking around with masks." This was a reprise of Surgeon General Jerome Adams' February 29 tweet: "Seriously people. STOP BUYING MASKS!" Adams added, "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!" A little over a month later, the government did an abrupt U-turn, with Trump announcing on April 3 that the surgeon general and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were now recommending that Americans voluntarily wear cloth masks in public to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Federal officials still wanted to reserve surgical masks and N95 masks for frontline health care workers. States then began introducing requirements that individuals wear face coverings in public. By the end of the year, 39 states would adopt such measures. These contradictory signals helped politicize facial masks. The controversy was further stoked by a January 2023 Cochrane Library analysis that was widely interpreted by many, including some of my Reason colleagues, as concluding that "masks don't work." In March 2023, Cochrane's editor issued a statement. "Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation," wrote Karla Soares-Weiser. "It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive." It takes at least two sides to politicize an issue. A July 1, 2020, op-ed in The New York Times compared refusing to wear a mask to "driving drunk" and the San Francisco Examiner on July 15, 2020, asserted "not wearing a mask makes you selfish, not an independent thinker." Mask skeptics were denounced as "covidiots." Five years after the COVID-19 emergency was declared, has more conclusive evidence emerged one way or the other? Masks are a big category: There are cloth masks, surgical masks, N95 respirators that block 95 percent of small particles. People use them both as source control—that is, to reduce the spread of respiratory droplet to others when an infected person talks, sneezes or coughs—and as respiratory protection for uninfected wearers. A June 2024 meta-analysis in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews synthesized evidence from more than 100 studies and reviews. It found that masks, "if correctly and consistently worn," are "effective in reducing transmission of respiratory diseases and show a dose-response effect." It also found that, N95 and KN95 masks were more effective than surgical or cloth masks. Using data from jurisdictions with mask mandates, the researchers concluded that "mask mandates are, overall, effective in reducing community transmission of respiratory pathogens." The efficacy of masks alone does not settle the question of mask mandates, which is far more complex. In their comprehensive 2024 report, Effectiveness of masks and respirators against respiratory infections, researchers associated with the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health reviewed 153 research articles on the effectiveness of mask use against infective agents or airborne droplets and particles. They reported that 128 of the articles they analyzed found masks to be effective. They noted that "systematic reviews of on randomized controlled trial studies in clinical or community settings demonstrated effectiveness in 10 out of 16 studies, and 20 out of 23 studies found mask mandates to be effective." A July BMJ 2024 article reported the results of a randomized controlled trial by a team of Norwegian researchers. They assigned half of their cohort of nearly 5,000 subjects to wear three-ply surgical masks in public spaces—shopping centers, streets, public transport, etc.—over a 14-day period. The researchers reported that 163 participants of 2,371 assigned to wear face masks versus 239 of 2,276 of non-wearers self-reported respiratory symptoms. The researchers concluded that "the results support the claim that face masks may be an effective measure to reduce the incidence of self-reported respiratory symptoms consistent with respiratory tract infections, but the effect size was moderate." In February 2025, the BMJ published a review evaluating the role of masks and respirators in preventing respiratory infections in health care and community settings. The British team noted the difficulty of evaluating studies conducted in the midst of an ongoing epidemic, but it concluded that "there is ample evidence on the effectiveness of masks and respirators in community and healthcare settings to inform consistent policy." It also concluded found that community mask use is effective during periods of increased transmission. The Finnish report noted that several early randomized controlled trials did not find community masking to be effective at preventing respiratory illnesses. In a March 2024 article in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, two researchers at Columbia University probed the discrepancy between mask efficacy as measured by laboratory experiments versus randomized controlled trials out in the real world. They found that individual masking behaviors—most specifically, disease transmission within households where masks are rarely used—limits mask efficacy in randomized controlled trials. Nevertheless, the researchers concluded that at the individual and population levels, masking effectively reduces the risk of infection and lowers epidemic intensity. Upshot: From the perspective of five years, most research finds that facial masking is at least modestly effective for preventing and slowing down the spread of respiratory illnesses like COVID-19. The post Do Face Masks Work? appeared first on
