That's a pretty hard analysis to make. You'd have to compare people that 1) wanted to get vaccinated and 2) _could_ have been vaccinated if they were in the US instead of Europe and 3) died from COVID during the 2 month delay and see how many lives were saved. My uninformed guess just eyeballing the historical death graphs and vaccine rollout is probably low 5 figures range.

I agree, analyzing it is probably outside the scope of any individual researcher. Nonetheless it feels like something you'd want to do before taking OWS as "a new model" for intervention! It's probably better than "control" (doing literally nothing) but was it better than, I don't know, instead subsidizing / organizing grocery delivery and other kinds of social support networks for two months? That's certainly less scientism-sexy and technocratic but if you're talking about maybe 20k deaths out of a million, it seems like we should be able to do much better. (At that low an impact, I might even believe the cost savings alone from the longer negotiations were justified - if I believed Germany would reallocate them to public health programs and not a new highway or gas pipeline or something.)