(Newser)
– For a brief moment last week, it appeared that the CDC was giving us the news we had hoped for: in reference to the real-world study of nearly 4,000 vaccinated individuals, the agency’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said Monday that ” our data … suggest … that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, they do not get sick “and, therefore, as many headlines have extrapolated, they cannot transmit or spread COVID-19. But scientists quickly rejected that claim for the New York Times, and the CDC itself later dropped Walensky’s comments. The end result? We just don’t know it yet, experts say. While the data is clear that vaccines against coronavirus, no matter the brand, are great at preventing serious illness and death, it is unclear whether they really prevent infection – and if a vaccinated person can still be infected, they still can spread the virus.
Experts pointed out that none of the vaccines is 100% effective, and Walensky’s comments may lead some to think so. It is important to obtain this correct statistic, they say, because if people mistakenly believe that vaccines are 100% effective, they can stop getting involved in public health measures, such as wearing masks. And then there is the issue of variants, which are increasingly spreading across the globe – and, in the case of some of them, they may be able to escape the vaccine. At 21 universities, including the University of Colorado Boulder, a study aims to determine whether the Modern vaccine prevents transmission of COVID. An epidemiologist told Quartz last month that he estimates an answer to the question in the “coming months”, and the site offers a summary of a series of population-level vaccine studies currently underway. (Read more coronavirus vaccine stories.)