by Dr Will Jones

Covid vaccines saved far fewer lives than first thought, a major new analysis from Stanford’s Professor John Ioannidis and team has concluded – closer to 2.5 million than the 14 million claimed by the WHO in 2022. The Telegraph has more.

In 2024, the World Health Organisation (WHO) claimed that jabs prevented the deaths of 14.4 million globally in the first year alone, with some estimates putting the figure closer to 20 million.

However, new modelling by Stanford University and Italian researchers suggests that while the vaccine did undoubtedly save lives, the true figure is “substantially more conservative” and closer to 2.5 million worldwide over the course of the entire pandemic.

The team estimated that nine of 10 prevented deaths were in the over-60s, with jabs saving just 299 youngsters aged under 20, and 1,808 people aged between 20 and 30 globally.

Overall 5,400 people needed to be vaccinated to save one life but in the under-30s this figure rose to 100,000 jabs, the paper suggests.

Researchers criticised “aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost”, adding that the findings had implications for how future vaccine rollouts are handled.

John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and the first author, said: “I think early estimates were based on many parameters having values that are incompatible with our current understanding.

“In principle, targeting the populations who would get the vast majority of the benefit and letting alone those with questionable risk-benefit and cost-benefit makes a lot of sense.

“Aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost were probably a bad idea.”

Since 2021, more than 13 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered.

But there have been mounting concerns that vaccines could be harmful for some people, particularly the young, and that the risk was not worth the benefit for a population at little risk from Covid.

More than 17,500 Britons have applied to the Government’s vaccine damage payment scheme believing they or loved ones were injured by the jab.

In June, manufacturers added warnings for myocarditis and pericarditis to Covid-19 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines’ prescribing information.

For the new study, experts used worldwide population data, alongside vaccine effectiveness and infection fatality rates, to estimate how many people died from a Covid infection before or after the periods of vaccination.

The team believes earlier modelling may have used overly pessimistic infection fatality rates and overly optimistic vaccine effectiveness, while failing to consider how quickly protection waned.

Earlier studies may also have underestimated how many people had already been unknowingly infected by the time they had the vaccine.

Worth reading in full.

Of course, some would dispute that the Covid vaccines saved any lives, arguing there’s no signal of reduced mortality in the big picture data.