Fact check: Biden says people vaccinated for COVID-19 'do not spread the disease'
The Republican National Committee said President Biden misled Americans about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines during an interview with a Dayton, Ohio, TV station. PolitiFact checks Biden's comments.
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As President Joe Biden heads toward his second year in office of leading the country through a pandemic, he faces the challenge of trying to convince millions of unvaccinated Americans to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The Republican National Committee said Biden has misled Americans about the effectiveness of the vaccine. The RNC tweeted a partial clip of an interview Biden gave to a Dayton, Ohio, TV station that aired Dec. 14.
At the time, Tara C. Smith, a Kent State University epidemiologist, told us: "Vaccination does significantly reduce transmission from vaccinated breakthrough cases but does not completely eliminate it."
A reader flagged Biden’s more recent remarks and asked us to look at his statement. Now that omicron has spread rapidly across the U.S. in December, we wanted to revisit the question: Can vaccinated people spread COVID-19?
We reached out again to experts to see if their understanding has changed about the role the vaccinated play in COVID-19’s transmission. We found that there is not enough data on how many people caught COVID-19 from an unvaccinated person vs. a vaccinated person in recent weeks, but scientists in general said that vaccinated people can also spread COVID-19.
Bill Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard, said Biden’s December "statement is not accurate."
"We knew that vaccinated people could become infected with delta and shed viable virus in large amounts," Hanage said. "While data are emerging and not yet complete for omicron, this appears to be even more the case for that variant."
Biden’s emphasis on promoting vaccination is rooted in evidence that it helps protect people from serious cases, including hospitalization and death. However, we found that Biden again inaccurately characterized the vaccine when he suggested that a vaccinated individual can’t spread the virus. Any concerns experts had about the accuracy of Biden’s statement before omicron seemed to have been strengthened in the face of this new variant.
We emailed spokespersons for the White House to ask for Biden’s evidence and did not hear back.
Vaccination doesn’t eliminate risk of transmission
John P. Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine, said while we lack data on omicron vaccine breakthrough infections, with delta there's evidence that vaccinated people can spread infections to other people.
"That’s true on an anecdotal level (we all know such cases) and there are a few papers, mostly out of the U.K., on this point," Moore said. However, infection spread is less likely when the infected person is vaccinated, he added.
"So, the vaccines work, but they are not perfect… I would expect that to be true also for omicron," Moore said. Biden would have been on firmer ground, Moore said, if he had said "make sure you’re vaccinated, so you’re less likely to spread the disease to anyone else."
Vaccinated people are less infectious, better protected
Biden is correct that COVID-19 is primarily a disease of the unvaccinated when we look at hospitalizations and deaths, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Brooke Nichols, a health economist and infectious disease mathematical modeler at Boston University, said "vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people. There is enough data to support this."
"While vaccinated individuals may be less infectious and infectious for a shorter duration of time they are by no means a dead-end host," Nichols said. "When calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated, though, it makes it sound as those vaccinated individuals aren’t substantially contributing to new cases — which they are (particularly now). Unvaccinated individuals do, however, continue to contribute disproportionately to hospitalizations and deaths."
However, Nichols added, "I don’t think the data systems in place can tell us anything about the proportion of new infections that originated from a vaccinated or unvaccinated person."
PolitiFact ruling
Biden said Dec. 14 that people vaccinated for COVID-19 "do not spread the disease to anyone else."
White House officials did not respond to our email asking for evidence, but Biden’s statement conflicts with information by the CDC that it is "likely that vaccinated people with breakthrough infection or people infected without symptoms can spread the virus to others." While the information from the CDC presentation was a couple of days after Biden spoke, it echoes what the CDC said in August about the potential for vaccinated people to transmit the virus.
Experts told us that getting vaccinated protects individuals from severe cases including hospitalization and death and reduces the chance of transmission, but Biden went too far when he suggested that vaccination completely eliminates the chance of transmission.
We rate this statement Mostly False.
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