Maintain safeguards even when vaccinated
The claim: “This is a bizarre, lunatic, totalitarian cult. It’s not about vaccines or protecting people’s lives — it is instead profoundly anti-science, and is only focused on absolute (government) control of every aspect of our lives.” — Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, on Twitter.
Cruz made the statement in response to guidance urging those vaccinated for COVID-19 to avoid travel and continue wearing masks.
PolitiFact rating: Pants on Fire! The emerging vaccines each were placed through months of clinical trials that tested for their efficacy in preventing illness. Their efficacy in preventing transmission was not part of the trials and is not yet known.
Discussion
Cruz responded specifically to Dr. Vin Gupta, a lung and intensive care unit doctor who appeared on MSNBC to caution vaccine recipients against abandoning the kinds of preventative measures public health experts have been emphasizing all year.
“This is one of the misperceptions here: Just because you get vaccinated with a second dose, it does not mean you should be participating in things like traveling in the middle of an out-ofcontrol pandemic or that you’re liberated from masks,” Gupta told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “Everything still applies until all of us get the two-dose regimen, and we don’t think that’s going to happen until June or July.”
Many unknowns surround the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. For instance, it’s unclear if vaccinations strictly protect infected people from serious illness, or if they also prevent people from transmitting the disease, Gupta said.
“Don’t let your guard down just because you got vaccinated,” he said. “You might be able to get infected by the virus and pass it on to others.”
The comment was enough to peeve Cruz, who has previously criticized guidance to wear masks and other measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But is that guidance really “anti-science,” as he called it?
“I think (Cruz) is talking beyond his knowledge,” said Dr. Jaquelin Dudley, professor of
molecular biosciences and associate director of the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Texas.
Cruz’s office did not respond to requests for clarification on precisely what the senator meant by “anti-science.”
But the guidance highlighted by Gupta is the same messaging that has come from the very top level of the U.S. coronavirus response apparatus. On Dec. 14, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Donald Trump’s top adviser on the coronavirus crisis, spoke before an online audience and gave the same advice.
“It’s not going to be like turning a light switch on and off. It’s not going to be overnight. It’s going to be gradual. ... I don’t believe we’re going to be able to throw the masks away and forget about physical separation and congregant settings for a while, probably likely until we get into the late fall and early next winter, but I think we can do it,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also advises that there is not enough information “to say if or when CDC will stop recommending that people wear masks and avoid close contact with others,” suggesting that more time is needed for experts to understand how the virus will respond to vaccinated persons.
According to Dr. Jonathan Temte of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, the clinical trials of the vaccine have only looked at how the vaccine prevents illness. Those trials didn’t provide any information on transmission, meaning that vaccinated people could still carry and spread the virus.
This is one of the primary sources of uncertainty surrounding the vaccine: whether vaccinated people can be contagious. If vaccinations protect only against illness and not transmissions, achieving herd immunity through vaccination becomes more difficult, according to the peerreviewed medical journal The Lancet.
“Pfizer and Moderna together project that there will be enough vaccines for 35 million individuals in 2020, and perhaps up to 1 billion in 2021,” The Lancet wrote. “As a result, many millions of people at high risk of disease will not be immunized any time soon, necessitating the continued use of non-pharmaceutical interventions.”
Furthermore, it’s also
unknown how long immunity will last in a vaccinated person, or how effective vaccination will be in older people or those with underlying comorbidities.