Vaccines: they have reduced mortality from Covid-19. We also explain it to Undersecretary Gemmato

Vaccines

Marcello Gemmato, Undersecretary of State with responsibility for Health at altitude Brothers of Italy, is convinced of this: there is no proof that vaccines against Covid-19 have reduced its mortality. "I do not fall into the trap of taking sides for or against vaccines", the words spoken according to the Ansa news agency immediately after saying that there is no evidence of the effectiveness of vaccinations against the lethality of the new coronavirus. And just a few hours before retracting, stating that "vaccines are precious" and his words have been exploited.

Well, then, look at the numbers, which are more difficult to exploit, which demonstrate that the words of Undersecretary Gemmato, exploited or not, are completely incorrect. And try to calculate the lethality rate, i.e. the share of people who died out of the total number of people affected by the disease. The situation in Italy, represented thanks to the data from the Civil Protection, is the one indicated in the graph below.

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Click here if not see the graph This graph, it should be clarified, is also influenced by the number of tampons. In the first wave lethality was so high also because a large part of the positivity cases, and necessarily also of the deaths, escaped the official count because the number of tests performed was very low. The Echo of Bergamo had written it, analyzing the data.

With the consolidation of the vaccination campaign, which it is good to remember is not an immediate process but which takes months to unfold, the lethality rate has never returned to the levels of the first wave. And with the arrival of the omicron variant, which blew up the number of daily positives (you can tell from the thickness of the line on the graph) it remained at very low levels.

Everything is confirmed if, instead of the lethality rate, we look at the number of deaths. Here is the situation in a graph.

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Click here if you do not see the graph The vaccination campaign started on the days when deaths from Covid-19 reached the peak of the second wave. The curve reached comparable levels a few months later, at the beginning of April, when however just 3.5 million Italians had been vaccinated. It has only come close to those levels since then with the arrival of the omicron variant, which required the administration of a third dose of the vaccine. And which has seen a number of daily cases recorded never seen before.

Now, there is a third element that can be taken into consideration to demonstrate that Undersecretary Gemmato is wrong in questioning the importance of vaccines in combating mortality from Covid-19. And it is precisely that relating to vaccine efficacy. A given that he does not open this piece because it is partial in terms of time and it is because the data is not open. But a researcher from the University of Calabria, Francesco Branda, made them so. The situation is the one depicted in this graph.

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Click here if you don't see the graph. Each bubble represents the incidence rate of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants calculated on the reference population. That is, comparing the unvaccinated dead with the total unvaccinated, the deaths among those who received only the first dose on the population as a whole with a single dose and so on. The bigger the bubble, the higher the incidence of deaths.

The graph clearly shows how deaths were higher among those who were not immunised. The filter in the lower part (top left for those reading from the desk) allows you to select other age groups in addition to the over 80s displayed by default. And to see even more in detail that vaccines have made a decisive contribution to reducing mortality, whatever Undersecretary Gemmato says about it.