04/01/2021

The Growing Evidence the COVID-19 Vaccines Reduce Transmission

Here’s what we know

More than 50 million Americans have now gotten their first shot against Covid-19, and 25 million have gotten two shots. There's strong evidence that the two COVID-19 vaccines Americans are getting — one by Pfizer/BioNTech, the other by Moderna — are highly effective at preventing illness, hospitalization and death.

Despite that fact, public health officials and media outlets have been warning that vaccinated people need to behave largely how they did before they were vaccinated. That's because we don't know as much about the vaccines' effectiveness at preventing transmission to others. A vaccinated person may be well-protected from COVID-19, but if they carry the virus, could they possibly infect the people around them?

But a growing body of evidence suggests the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines do, in fact, cut down on viral transmission. Two recent studies show some pretty favorable results — one from the UK that found that two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine reduced by 86 percent someone's chances of developing an infection that they could pass along, the other a study in Israel that found an 89.4 percent reduction (though it should be noted that the Israeli study has yet to be fully released). These findings are consistent with what we know about vaccines and transmission in general.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Vox.