Researchers reported on Thursday that COVID-19 vaccines saved nearly 20 million people during their first year.

Over the following twelve months, more than 4.3 billion people worldwide lined up to get vaccinated.

Oliver Watson from Imperial College London, who led the new modeling study, said that although these efforts were marred by ongoing inequality, they prevented deaths on an unimaginable scale.

Watson said about the outcome if vaccines were not available to fight the virus: "The word disaster would be the first that comes to mind." The results "show how much worse the pandemic could have been if we did not have these vaccines."

Researchers used data from 185 countries to estimate that vaccines prevented 4.2 million