UK analysts have estimated that Chinese vaccines saved more than 3 million lives in the first year of the global vaccination campaign - not including the millions saved inside China.

A new study published by health analytics firm Airfinity on Wednesday shows that the Chinese inoculations Sinovac and Sinopharm, combined, saved more than 3 million lives outside the country in which they were created.

Figures from China were excluded from the study in part because the figures would have had too large an influence on estimates of deaths averted due to the country's large population.

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Airfinity's findings build on a report published last month by Imperial College London on excess deaths during the pandemic that calculated COVID-19 vaccines saved more than 20 million lives between December 2020 and December 2021.

Combining Imperial's research on deaths averted per country with an analysis of which vaccines were administered in each nation, the analytics agency then modeled the number of lives saved per vaccine.

According to its report, AstraZeneca had the largest impact, saving 6.3 million lives, while Pfizer-BioNTech saved 5.9 million. Sinovac followed with 2 million lives saved and Moderna 1.7 million.

Airfinity's analytics director Matt Linley explained that the reason AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech were so successful in the study was that both succeeded in scaling up production quickly and delivering doses before other manufacturers.

"AstraZeneca may have saved the most lives due to where its primary series was distributed and who received it," he said, pointing to the fact its vaccines first went to older age groups in high income countries and nations with less robust health care systems.

"Both factors would have resulted in averting more deaths in the first year of vaccinations," he said.

While Sinopharm and Sinovac were most widely distributed in China, Airfinity estimated in a separate study that by October 2021, China had commercially exported 1.1 billion doses of its vaccines to 123 countries, making it a world leader in vaccine exports.

Airfinity said of its current study that omitting the number of lives saved in the country from its modeling was "unlikely to change the picture much," due to the fact strong lockdowns played a more important role than vaccines Beijing's coronavirus response, "thus the impact of vaccines there would be much much lower."

However, more than 1.26 billion people are fully vaccinated in China - where the two most widely used vaccines were Sinovac and Sinopharm - meaning estimates for the total number of lives saved by the Chinese inoculations would be expected to be considerably higher.