Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Italy has implemented an extensive vaccination campaign involving individuals above the age of 12, both sexes. The public opinion and the medical community alike questioned the usefulness and efficacy of the vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. The widespread opinion was that the vaccines protected individuals especially against serious conditions which could require intensive care and may lead to the death of the patient rather than against the possibility of infection. In order to quantify the effect of the vaccination campaign, we calculated the relative risks of non-vaccinated and vaccinated individuals for all possible outcomes of the disease: infection, hospitalization, admission to intensive care and death. Relative risk was assessed by means of likelihood ratios, the ratios of the probability of an outcome in non-vaccinated individuals to the probability of the same outcome in vaccinated individuals. Results support the hypothesis that vaccination has an extensive protective effect against both critical conditions and death. Nonetheless, the relative magnitude of the protection in vaccinated individuals compared to those non-vaccinated appears to be higher against the former outcome than the latter, for reasons which need to be investigated further.
Keywords: Italy; likelihood ratios; non-linearity; pandemic; relative risk.