The effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination: time series evidence from the UK

ABSTRACT

Some claims have been made that that Covid vaccination is effective against both infection and mortality, even though the WHO is seeking more evidence to determine how well vaccines stop infection and transmission. On the basis of UK daily data over the period 10 January 2021–6 January 2022, evidence is presented indicating that vaccination is not effective against infection but it is highly effective against mortality. This makes scientific sense because the function of vaccination is to stimulate the production of antibodies that fight off the virus, which does not imply the ability to stop infection.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• vaccination
• infection rate
• mortality rate

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I18
• I19

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to an anonymous referee for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Data were obtained from https://ourworldindata.org

² For a detailed description of these indicators and others, see Moosa (2021).

³ Observations 326 and 362 correspond to 22 December 2021 and 6 January 2020, respectively.

⁴ For details on specification and estimation, see Koopman et al. (1999).