New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that people who get COVID-19 vaccines don’t carry the virus that causes the disease, the CDC’s director said late Monday.
“Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials, but it’s also in real-world data,” Rochelle Walensky, the director, said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Nearly 4,000 frontline workers self-collected nasal swabs for 13 consecutive weeks in the study, which included about 2,480 people who were fully vaccinated.
The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer at present require two doses.
Another 12 percent of volunteers were injected with only one dose. The rest received no vaccine.
The study is one of many that supports the vaccines being “very effective in preventing virus transmission,” Dr. Peter Gulick, an associate professor of Medicine at the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State University and an expert on infectious diseases, told The Epoch Times.
“So you might be asymptomatic and still carry the virus, still be able to transmit it to somebody if there was enough virus, but more and more things are coming out saying that’s not so, that even if there was virus in your nose, that it wouldn’t be enough to transmit to somebody else,“ he added. ”So it’s kind of reassuring because that was the purpose of people always wearing their masks even after vaccinations when they went into places where people hadn’t been vaccinated yet.”
Still, Walensky of the CDC remains concerned about a rise in the number of daily CCP virus cases in the United States as a whole.
“I’m watching the cases tick up. I’m watching us have increased numbers of hypertransmissible variants. I’m watching our travel numbers tick up. And the sense is, I’ve seen what it looks like to anticipate the oncoming surge. And what I really would hate to have happen is to have another oncoming surge. Just as we’re reaching towards getting so many more people vaccinated, we’re still losing people at 1,000 deaths a day. And so I just can’t face another surge when there’s so much optimism right at our fingertips,” she said on MSNBC.
Another worry is whether variants of the virus make the vaccines less effective. That makes stopping the circulation of the virus even more urgent, Walensky said.
Approximately 52.6 million Americans were fully vaccinated against the CCP virus, with another 42.5 million getting one of two doses, as of March 29.
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