Vaccines and disease prevention — I'll pull the latest evidence on how effective they are.
Yes, vaccines are an effective tool to prevent disease, according to major public health authorities and extensive scientific evidence.
•One of the most effective prevention methods: Vaccination is one of the most effective ways to prevent diseases. Vaccines reduce risks of getting a disease by working with your body's natural defenses to build protection. When you get a vaccine, your immune system responds.
•Broad protection against many diseases: We now have vaccines to prevent more than 30 life-threatening diseases and infections, helping people of all ages live longer, healthier lives. Vaccines protect against many different diseases including cervical cancer, cholera, COVID-19, diphtheria, hepatitis B, influenza, measles, meningitis, polio, rabies and others.
•They prevent illness, disability and death: Vaccines prevent illness, disability, or death from infectious diseases such as whooping cough, meningitis, and measles. Vaccines are also critical to the prevention and control of infectious disease outbreaks. They underpin global health security and are a vital tool in the battle against antimicrobial resistance.
•History shows vaccines are the safest, most effective way to protect against preventable diseases: History shows that vaccines are the safest, most effective way to protect yourself and your family from many preventable diseases.
•Large-scale evidence of effectiveness:
•Immunization currently prevents 3.5 million to 5 million deaths every year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), influenza and measles.
•Over the past 50 years, essential vaccines against just 14 diseases have saved at least 154 million lives.
•Vaccination is one of the most effective interventions against infectious diseases and is estimated to prevent 2-3 million deaths annually.
•Vaccines are among the most cost-effective ways to protect against infectious diseases. The introduction of a vaccine has, in many cases, led to a very large decrease in the incidence of the targeted disease — such as the 96% decrease in the incidence of polio that occurred within 7 years of the introduction of the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines.
•In the United States during the 'vaccines for children era' (1994-2013), routine childhood vaccinations prevented more than 322 million cases of infectious diseases, 21 million hospitalisations, and 731,700 deaths.
•Effectiveness against variants and severe disease: Based on what we know so far, vaccines are proving effective against existing variants, especially at preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death. However, some variants are having a slight impact on the ability of vaccines to guard against mild disease and infection.
Vaccines do not provide 100% protection for every individual and effectiveness can vary by vaccine, disease, age and immune status, but at both individual and population levels they significantly reduce the burden of infectious diseases, prevent outbreaks and save millions of lives.