People who are vaccinated for the coronavirus “cannot spread it to you."
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Alex Bugarin, 13, is vaccinated at a school-based COVID-19 vaccination clinic in San Pedro, Calif., on May. 24, 2021. (AP)
Joe Biden overstates how well vaccines prevent person-to-person virus spread
If Your Time is short
• Multiple studies show that a vaccinated person is significantly less likely to pass the coronavirus to someone else than an unvaccinated person is.
• However, the transmission risk is not reduced to zero.
During a visit to a construction site near Chicago, President Joe Biden promoted his policies to increase vaccination rates, arguing that beating back the coronavirus is the best way to boost the nation’s economy.
"My administration is now requiring federal workers to be vaccinated," Biden said on Oct. 7. "We’ve also required federal contractors to be vaccinated. ... We’re requiring active duty military to be vaccinated."
Biden then addressed vaccine requirements for medical workers: "We’re making sure health care workers are vaccinated, because if you seek care at a health care facility, you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you."
Some critics of Biden suggested that he had left an inaccurate impression — that if you're vaccinated, you can't spread the virus.
Those critics had a point: Biden did overstate the degree to which vaccination curbs an individual’s ability to spread the virus to someone else. (The White House did not respond to inquiries for this article.)
In fact, this is the stated position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a discussion of the more readily transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus published on Aug. 26, the CDC wrote that "fully vaccinated people with delta variant breakthrough infections can spread the virus to others."
Experts contacted by PolitiFact agreed.
Biden "should not be so firm" in his phrasing, said Tara C. Smith, a Kent State University epidemiologist. "Vaccination does significantly reduce transmission from vaccinated breakthrough cases but does not completely eliminate it."
Babak Javid, a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, said there are "many examples of onward transmission from vaccines," even beyond the most well-known example, an outbreak in the summer of 2021 that included many vaccinated people in Provincetown, Mass.
So Biden is exaggerating when he suggests that someone who is vaccinated "cannot spread" the virus. But scientists agree that vaccination does cut transmission of the coronavirus significantly, even for the delta variant.
