Are vaccines an effective tool to prevent disease?

I'll search the latest evidence on how well vaccines prevent disease.

Yes, vaccines are one of the most effective tools to prevent disease.

The evidence is overwhelming and supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and decades of global data:

•Highly effective prevention: 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.

•Broad protection: We now have vaccines to prevent more than 30 life-threatening diseases and infections, helping people of all ages live longer, healthier lives. They 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.

•Massive lives saved:

•Over the past 50 years, essential vaccines against just 14 diseases have saved at least 154 million lives

•Immunization currently prevents 3.5 million to 5 million deaths every year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), influenza and measles

•Research shows that routine vaccinations for children born during 1994–2023 will have prevented about 508 million illnesses and 32 million hospitalizations and saved over 1.1 million lives

•Disease eradication and control: Vaccines are considered one of the greatest medical achievements. They have eradicated smallpox and reduced global child mortality and long-term disabilities from vaccine-preventable diseases.

•Immunization programmes succeeded in eradicating smallpox from the world ten years after WHO launched an eradication campaign in 1967, when there were more than 2 million deaths from the disease

•"Vaccines are among the most powerful inventions in history, making once-feared diseases preventable"

•"Thanks to vaccines, smallpox has been eradicated, polio is on the brink"

•Modern evidence: A sweeping global review has found that mRNA vaccines—now administered billions of times worldwide—are safe and highly effective at preventing infectious diseases like COVID-19.

•Cost-effective public health tool: Vaccines are among the most successful and cost-effective public health tools available for preventing serious disease and death.

No vaccine is 100% effective for every person, and effectiveness can vary by disease, vaccine type, age, and need for booster doses, and protection can wane over time. However, at both individual and population levels — through direct protection and community immunity/herd immunity — vaccines dramatically reduce infection, severe illness, hospitalization, disability, and death.

Vaccines undergo rigorous testing through multiple phases of clinical trials and are continuously monitored for safety at local, national and global levels after introduction.

Citations (3)

1who.intGovernment
Vaccines and immunization: Vaccine safety
Backs: “The evidence is overwhelming and supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and decades of global data: Highly effective prevention: Vaccination is one of the most effective ways to prevent diseases.”
2who.intGovernment
Know the facts
Backs: “Highly effective prevention: 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.”
3cdc.govGovernment
Vaccines and the Diseases they Prevent
Backs: “Immunization currently prevents 3.5 million to 5 million deaths every year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), influenza and measles. Research shows that routine vaccinations for children born during 1994–2023 will have prevented about 508 million illnesses and 32 million…”