One Stark Way to Assess the Impact of COVID-19 Vaccination: Most New Deaths and Hospitalizations Are in the Unvaccinated

If clinical trials and scientific data are not enough to convince every American to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, maybe a sobering new report from the Associated Press will do the trick. In short, after crunching data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the AP concluded that most new COVID-19 deaths occur in people who are not vaccinated. In May, only around 150 of the 18,000 Americans (0.8%) who died were fully vaccinated. Similarly, fewer than 1,200 of the 107,000 people (1.1%) who were hospitalized for COVID-19 in the U.S had received a full dose of the vaccine. The report acknowledges that breakthrough cases resulting in hospitalization or death are probably a small percentage of the total number of breakthrough cases (which were not the focus of the research), but this only underscores the lifesaving benefit of vaccination.