Graphs show how many children vaccines have saved over 50 years

If vaccines did not exist, 150 million children would have died in the last 50 years, thirteen times the current population of Belgium. This is the striking conclusion of an international study published in early May 2024. A welcome result that is more likely to be associated with some vaccines than others, and with certain regions of the world where the benefits are particularly impressive. To see things more clearly, Our World in Data, a website created by the University of Oxford, decided to create graphs that perfectly summarize the researchers’ findings.

An astronomical number of lives have been saved thanks to certain vaccines.

As an introduction, below is the number of lives saved by vaccination from 1974 to 2024. The total amount corresponds to the figure given earlier – 153.84 million. This result then worsens depending on the disease. Thus, it appears that the measles vaccine saved the most lives: 93.71 million children were treated and survived, including 6.5 million in Europe. In second place is the fight against tetanus – 27.95 million. On the last step of the podium we see whooping cough with 13.17 million.

Subsequent vaccines have had less dramatic results, but remain extremely commendable nonetheless. The rest of the ranking thus includes vaccines against tuberculosis (10.87 million), bacterial meningitis (2.85 million), pneumococcus (1.63 million) and polio (1.57 million). The rest all fall below the million mark, even if the numbers remain at the level of several hundred thousand people saved (for example, from hepatitis B, rotavirus, diphtheria, etc.).

Africa can thank vaccines

Our World in Data then shows the cumulative number of lives saved by vaccination since 1974, by region of the world. Therefore, it immediately becomes clear that the first beneficiary continent is Africa. Over 50 years, almost 50 million lives were saved there. Southeast Asia, another tropical region, follows with a population of nearly 40 million. The Eastern Mediterranean was not spared, where 25 million deaths were avoided.

In Europe, vaccination campaigns are older, so the fight against these diseases is already in full swing. Regardless, without vaccines there would have been at least 7.2 million deaths over 50 years.

Good vaccination rates in Europe, sometimes declining elsewhere.

To effectively control the spread of disease, critical thresholds must be achieved with high levels of vaccination. Fortunately, these goals have been achieved for a number of diseases. This can be seen in the graph showing the percentage of one-year-old children vaccinated against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus. In Europe, the first region in the ranking, 94% of children are treated. A more or less stable figure since the late 1990s. The bad news is that rates often tend to go down elsewhere. Thus, America’s share has increased from 90% in 2017 to 80% in 2021, that is, in just four years. In Southeast Asia, the drop is even sharper, from 91% in 2019 to 82% in 2021.

For measles, Europe again ranks first, tied with the Western Pacific at 91%. In other countries, vaccination rates tend to be lower. Africa thus barely reached 41%, suggesting significant progress in the number of lives saved. Over 50 years, thanks to even lower measles vaccination rates, 28.6 million Africans avoided death. The only flaw in this table: Southeast Asia is the only region in the world where measles vaccination rates have dropped from 83% in 2019 to 80% in 2021.

There’s still work to be done

Finally, Our World in Data graphed the number of deaths caused by vaccine-preventable diseases to give an idea of ​​what a 100% vaccination rate would lead to. It turns out that the most important preventable disease is tuberculosis. In 2019, 1.18 million people died from it. That’s an improvement on 1990’s 1.78 million deaths, but the figure remains colossal. The most affected countries are India (422,634 deaths according to the latest data), Indonesia (76,549) and Pakistan (62,774).

It’s no surprise that measles continues to claim many victims. In 1990 alone, 801,683 people died from the disease. Today the figure is much lower, but not negligible: 83,392 people died in 2019.

Among the other diseases counted, 2019 continued to have many deaths from meningitis (236.22 preventable deaths), whooping cough (116,510), tetanus (34,684) and even hepatitis B (32,484). All are in decline compared to the number of deaths recorded in the past. There is only one exception: cervical cancer, from which the number of preventable deaths continues to rise, even though there is a vaccine against the human papillomaviruses that cause them. In 1990, researchers recorded 184,527 preventable deaths. In 2019, this number increased to 280,479.