Vaccines Won’t Stop Transmission

Everyday that I arrive at work, I think to myself, how grateful I am to be working for a company that does not require me to be vaccinated. Roughly three years ago during my last semester as a student, I had to cut my final research short due to school closures; finishing my degree online was not only depressing, but it also forced me to take a pause in my educational career and life. Not wanting to rely on the social security net offered by our government of Trudeau, I found several jobs to make ends meet before the mandatory vaccinations took place. After it had taken place, I had found my current job. Thank God, and thank you to my boss who did not believe in this madness of Covid-19 where political agendas guided public health policies instead of sound scientific empirical evidence.

Fast forward to today, I am astonished at the fact that many institutions still require people to be either vaccinated or partially vaccinated in order to be considered for a job. To have such a policy in place would require a great deal of scientific rigor to reinforce this position. However, the efficacy of such a policy to reduce transmission and to protect others is questionable due to the lack of scientific evidence.

It is unquestionable that the Covid-19 vaccines are efficacious in preventing severe illness and death in certain populations (although most people in these categories are at risk for many different illnesses and diseases), but that is entirely different from prevention of transmission. Anika Singanaygam, a clinical lecturer in the section of Adult Infectious Disease at Imperial College, mentions that “The main point of vaccines is not to do with preventing transmission….The main reasons for vaccines for Covid-19 is to prevent illness and death”.(1)

In a study that investigated the community transmission of viral load in the SARS-CoV-2 Delta (B.167.2) variant in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the UK, the authors found that in densely sampled households, secondary attack rates for unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals were 38% and 25% respectively. Accordingly, “the finding indicates that breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people can efficiently transmit infection in the household setting.”(2) Additionally, the authors also mentioned that the time interval between the study and fully vaccinated people supported the evidence of waning immunity; meaning that the interval between the fully vaccinated and the study was after 2-3 months of the second dose.(2,3,4)

Reverberated by Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, “Most studies show if you got an infection after vaccination, compared with someone who got an infection without a vaccine, you were pretty much shedding roughly the same amount of virus.” (1) As well, the CDC themselves claimed that there is “no difference in infectious virus titer between groups” implying that there aren’t any differences between vaccinated or unvaccinated individuals in transmitting the virus.(5)

The leading scientific evidence is clearly supporting the position that whether you are vaccinated or unvaccinated, you are at risk for infection, and once infected you both have similar viral loads that shed onto others. Therefore, the institutions that still have the fully vaccinated policy are not following the most current scientific evidence. In fact, they are following political dogma and are misinformed about the efficacy of vaccines in preventing transmission.

Is this the fault of the institutions or the failure of public health messaging onto the public with honesty and integrity? It is both, unfortunately, public health of Canada has failed its citizens in properly managing the pandemic and has repeatedly shown they are incompetent for the task; the failure of lockdowns, the inferiority of masks to prevent transmission, and vaccine mandates/passports. However, I will not go further into this as I will be writing for the next year summarizing all the evidence (which I have partially done in my previous posts - if you want to read on the failure of lockdowns). I urge individuals to stand strong and businesses to re-evaluate their policy on vaccination status. If we are to move further and better society as a whole, we need to match policy with scientific rigor - Otherwise we are blindly moving forward and as history has shown, when we deviate from scientific empirical evidence, society loses.

1. Stokel-Walker C. What do we know about covid vaccines and preventing transmission?. BMJ. 2022;376(o298):1-2 doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o298
   

2. Singanayagam A., Hakki S., Dunning J., et al. Community transmission and viral load kinetics of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta (B.1.617.2) variant in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the UK: a prospective, longitudinal, cohort study. The Lancet Infectious Diseases. 2022;22(2):183-195. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00648-4
   

3. Levine-Tiefenbrun M, Yelin I, Alapi H, et al. Waning of SARS-CoV-2 booster viral-load reduction effectiveness. MedRxiv. Preprint posted December 29, 2021.
   

4. 9. Levin EG, Lustig Y, Cohen C, et al. Waning immune humoral response to BNT162b2 Covid-19 vaccine over 6 months. The New England Journal of Medicine. 2021;385(84),1-11. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2114583#article_references
   

5. Riemersma KK, Grogan BE, Kita-Yarbro A, etal. Shedding of infection SARS-CoV-2 despite vaccination.Medrxiv 2021.07.31.21261387 [Preprint]. doi: 10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387