Thursday, Jul. 22, 2021
Because the COVID-19 vaccine is free, does that mean it’s not valuable in saving lives?
A social media post falsely tries to compare consumer cost to effectiveness, saying COVID-19 vaccinations are free but if they saved lives "they'd be priced so high that you literally could not afford them … like insulin."
It's not a valid comparison. The U.S. government pays the three manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. billions of dollars for the shots, which are administered to people at no charge to save lives and stem the spread of the coronavirus. Insulin prices, meanwhile, are determined by the pharmaceutical companies that market insulin.
Health officials say cases, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 are increasing nationwide, with more than 97% of new hospitalizations being unvaccinated patients.
Over 607,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States as of July 20, 2021, according to the CDC. More than 336 million COVID-19 vaccinations have been administered in the U.S.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
- US Department of Health and Human Services COVID-19 Care for Uninsured Individuals
- US News & World Report CDC Head: COVID-19 Becoming ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’
- Centers For Disease Control COVID Data Tracker Weekly Review
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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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