COVID Shots ‘Saved Far Fewer Lives Than First Thought,' Mainstream Media Admits
New JAMA study finds 100,000 COVID shots were needed to save a single life under age 30—researchers slam mandates as “zealotry.”
In a major mainstream narrative reversal, the U.K.’s The Telegraph—a London-based international daily broadsheet—has published a damning admission: the COVID-19 injections “saved far fewer lives than first thought.”
The new research was published in the JAMA Health Forum on July 25, 2025.
Covering what it calls a “major new analysis,” The Telegraph reports that scientists behind the study are now openly criticizing “aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost.”
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The outlet cites new modeling conducted by researchers at Stanford University and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy, which sharply contradicts the World Health Organization’s (WHO) prior estimate that COVID jabs prevented 14.4 million deaths globally in their first year of use.
Instead, the Stanford-led study estimates the true figure to be closer to just 2.5 million deaths prevented over the entire course of the pandemic.
“Covid vaccines saved far fewer lives than first thought, a major new analysis has concluded, with researchers criticising ‘aggressive mandates’... New modelling by Stanford University and Italian researchers suggests that while the vaccines did save lives, the true figure was ‘substantially more conservative’ and closer to 2.5 million people worldwide over the course of the pandemic.”
The study also reveals how age-stratified benefit was overwhelmingly skewed toward the elderly, raising serious questions about the mass vaccination of low-risk populations.
“The team estimated that nine of 10 prevented deaths were in the over-60s, with jabs saving just 299 people aged under 20, and 1,808 people aged between 20 and 30 globally. Overall 5,400 people needed to be vaccinated to save one life, but in the under-30s this figure rose to 100,000 jabs, the paper suggests.”
The first author of the paper, Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford, told The Telegraph:
“I think early estimates were based on many parameters having values that are incompatible with our current understanding. In principle, targeting the populations who would get the vast majority of the benefit and letting alone those with questionable risk-benefit and cost-benefit makes a lot of sense. Aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost were probably a bad idea.”
The team believes that roughly 14.8 million life-years were saved over the course of the pandemic, amounting to just one life-year per 900 vaccine doses administered.
“Researchers concluded that although vaccines had a ‘substantial benefit’ on global mortality, it was ‘mostly limited’ to older people.”
Dr. Angelo Maria Pezzullo, a public health researcher at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, explained:
“Before ours, several studies tried to estimate lives saved by vaccines with different models and in different periods or parts of the world, but this one is the most comprehensive because it is based on worldwide data. It also covers the omicron period. It also calculates the number of years of life that was saved, and it is based on fewer assumptions about the pandemic trend.”
The Telegraph notes that more than 13 billion COVID shots have been administered since 2021.
But public confidence has continued to wane, particularly among younger populations facing far lower risk of severe COVID outcomes—and increasing evidence of vaccine harms like myocarditis and pericarditis.
“There have been mounting concerns that vaccines could be harmful for some people, particularly the young, and that the risk was not worth the benefit for a population at little risk from Covid. More than 17,500 Britons have applied to the Government’s vaccine damage payment scheme, believing they or loved ones were injured by the jabs. In June, manufacturers added warnings for myocarditis and pericarditis to the prescribing information of Covid messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.”
British MP Sir David Davis, known for his opposition to vaccine mandates, welcomed the study as vindication.
“Frankly it’s a good cautionary tale that if we have another pandemic we should be far more clinical about the risk-benefit ratio. We knew pretty quickly who the most susceptible groups were and we should have focused very strictly on them, rather than placing people who were at little risk in hazard’s way. The level of aggression of trying to force people to become vaccinated and shutting down people who were raising concerns, the reasons for those concerns are all validated in this report.”
The data is in, the damage is done, and even the mainstream press can no longer deny it—millions were coerced into taking a product that saved few, harmed many, and was pushed with a zealotry science never justified.
CDC VAERS watchdogs confirm 38,709 deaths have been linked to COVID jabs.
But keep in mind that the CDC’s VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Reporting System) tool is estimated to underreport by a factor of 100, according to a $1-million study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and conducted by Harvard Pilgrim.
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