“In one year, half the species vaccinated — wow!” said Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, referring to the period after which vaccines started to become available. He has been marveling on his well-followed Twitter feed about how lucky the world got with Covid vaccines; he calls them “an extraordinary human achievement.”

Topol was among the skeptics in early March of 2020 when Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told a Senate committee that it would take at least 12 to 18 months to develop a Covid vaccine. “I thought it was a fantasy. Total fantasy,” he told STAT in a recent interview…

Consider for a moment what might have happened without these vaccines.

According to modeling conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, 1.1 million additional Americans would have died from Covid — and that estimate was made based on data from before the massive Omicron wave that has swept across the country in past two months.

“We would have been broken,” said Topol. “Right now, we have a death toll of around 2,500 people a day. … Imagine what we would have with no vaccination.”