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The Good News About COVID-19 Vaccines
3 facts about coronavirus vaccinations to brighten up your day
At the end of a long, dark COVID-19 winter, vaccines are the spring we’ve all been waiting for. If you had asked most scientists this time last year whether they thought that we would have a COVID-19 vaccine licensed and given to millions of people by the start of 2021, the answer would almost certainly be “absolutely not”.
And yet, here we are. Millions of people already immunized, safe from the numerous harms of COVID-19. It’s been a doom-filled year, but things are really looking up for us all.
How good are the vaccines really? Well, we already knew, from the massive clinical trial evidence, that our COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective enough to use — even a relatively bad vaccine is much safer than infection with COVID-19. But now we have real-world data rolling in from tens of millions of vaccinations, which allows us to see things at a population scale.
The results are in. And they are looking good.
So here are some facts about COVID-19 vaccinations to brighten your day.
They Are Safe
As I’ve written before, we knew from clinical trial evidence that there were no common serious adverse events from COVID-19 vaccines. Given the size of the trials, we could exclude things that happened once every few thousand people, which means that any serious issues had to be pretty rare.
But, with millions vaccinated, we can put a number on just how often these serious side-effects — things that can be life-threatening — happen.
In a word? Rarely.
Using data from the UK and US, we can confidently say that the rate of serious issues associated with vaccination is somewhere around 10–15 per million vaccine doses given. The most common serious problem is anaphylaxis, which makes up the vast…
