Covid Inquiry’s Module 4 report - Estimating Lives Saved by the Vaccines: Part 2

In November 2024, we reported on The BBC’s statement that AstraZeneca and Pfizer saved over 12 million lives in the first year of Covid vaccination. The modellers fitted a model to all-cause excess mortality, used more modelling to estimate the number of lives saved, and ended up with an implausible result. The modellers wanted us to believe that in the absence of vaccination, there would have been 1,174,679 deaths in the UK in 2021 as opposed to the 667,479 deaths that occurred.

Establishing claims of effectiveness Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson · November 25, 2024 Read full story

Here we now turn to the evidence from the Inquiry that ‘numerous studies have been conducted to understand the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on COVID-related and all-cause mortality.’

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So, how many is “numerous”: 5? 50? 500? And what kinds of studies? Observational? RCTs? Meta-analyses?

An official inquiry is expected to be precise and transparent about evidence, distinguish between types and quality of studies and avoid language that could be seen as vague or open to interpretation, especially on contentious topics

So while it’s vague and non-evidentiary, we can look at the citations: ‘numerous’ refers to FOUR studies.

• UKHSA, 2021a. COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report: 30 September 2021 (week 39)

• Mesle et al., 2021. Estimated number of deaths directly averted in people 60 years and older as a result of COVID-19 vaccination in the WHO European Region, December 2020 to November 2021.

• Mesle et al., 2024 Estimated number of lives directly saved by COVID-19 vaccination programmes in the WHO European Region from December, 2020, to March, 2023: a retrospective surveillance study.

• Watson et al., 2022. Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study.

Let’s be clear: Four studies is not “numerous” in any meaningful scientific sense. More importantly, the issue isn’t just the number, but the type of evidence:

• UKHSA (2021) → surveillance report (descriptive, not a primary analytic study).

• Meslé et al. (2021, 2024) → modelling / retrospective estimation studies.

• Watson et al. (2022) → global modelling study.

So, we effectively have: 1 surveillance report, 3 modelling/estimation studies and zero primary clinical studies (e.g. RCTs, large cohort mortality analyses) cited here...