During the peak years of the United States’ armed involvement in the Vietnam War, more than 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives in combat. This sobering figure not only scarred the conscience of a nation but also shaped a generation.

If a new study is accurate, lives in excess of four times that number were saved by the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program during a nine-month span of the historic pandemic. It wasn’t an ordinary mass vaccination program — the scientists behind the first successful inoculations to reach the market had to utilize a revolutionary mRNA vaccine technology, one that was able to prove tremendously effective against earlier variants.

In the study, which was published this week in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other government agencies compiled data on COVID-19-associated hospitalizations that took place between Dec. 1, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021. The figures were […]