
Sumary of If You’re Vaccinated Can You Transmit COVID-19? What We Know:
- Scientists are still working to figure out how well COVID-19 vaccines prevent vaccinated people from transmitting the virus to others..
- Clinical trials and real-world studies have shown that the COVID-19 vaccines are very effective at preventing severe COVID-19..
- But scientists don’t fully know yet how much the vaccines reduce transmission of the virus from a vaccinated person to others..
- A COVID-19 vaccine that is very effective at preventing people from contracting the coronavirus in the first place can help reduce transmission..
- However, the primary goal of clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines was to show whether the vaccines prevent symptomatic infections and, in some cases, moderate or severe COVID-19..
- Most trials weren’t designed to show whether the vaccines also block asymptomatic infections — those that don’t cause symptoms..
- Since those first studies, researchers have carried out additional research that provides clues to how well the vaccines prevent all infections..
- Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released initial results from a study on the real-world effectiveness of the two mRNA vaccines approved in the United States, those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-NIAID..
- Researchers collected weekly nasal swabs from all participants to see if they had any viral genetic material, regardless of whether they had COVID-19 symptoms..
- The vaccines were 90 percent effective at blocking infections — symptomatic and asymptomatic — in people who had two doses of the vaccine, and 80 percent effective in people who had one dose..
- That means there was a 90 percent decrease in infections in people who were fully vaccinated compared with a similar unvaccinated group of people..
- Studies like this show that the mRNA vaccines greatly reduce infections, but these are just two of the vaccines available..
- While all the approved vaccines offer strong protection against severe COVID-19 and hospitalization, the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson &.
- Some research suggests that even if a person who has been vaccinated contracts an infection, the virus may be less infectious in this case — at least for certain vaccines..
- In a study published in late March in Nature Medicine, Israeli researchers found that people who had been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and later contracted an infection had lower viral loads than unvaccinated people who contracted an infection..
- “The results show that infections occurring 12 [days] or longer after vaccination have significantly reduced viral loads at the time of testing, potentially affecting viral shedding and contagiousness as well as the severity of the disease,”.
- The Nature Medicine research was an observational study, not a randomized controlled trial, so a number of factors could have affected the results..
- In addition, while a lower viral load suggests less infectiousness, the researchers say we don’t currently know the “infectious dose”.
- Researchers from the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN), which is headquartered at Seattle Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, are currently recruiting 12,000 college students to take part in this type of study..
- After vaccination, students will collect nasal swabs every day for 4 months to see whether they contract an infection..
- Researchers will also track infections that occur in close contacts of students in the study who contract an infection….