- New research finds that getting vaccinated doesn’t just help protect you from COVID-19, it also helps protect those around you who haven’t yet been vaccinated — including young kids.
- The research appears to verify that the vaccine may be helping lower transmission rates in some unvaccinated populations. However, experts caution this is just one study, and more research is needed.
- The continued use of masks and physical distancing are still recommended until herd immunity is achieved.
A recent review of nearly 3.5 million COVID-19 test results from between July 5, 2020, and March 9, 2021, indicates some promising news.
According to its findings, getting vaccinated doesn’t just help protect you from COVID-19, it also helps protect those around you — including those who haven’t yet been vaccinated.
This is good news for parents with young children who are not yet eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccine or who may have a medical condition that prevents them from getting vaccinated.
“This study verifies what we all believed,” Amit Kumar, PhD, a veteran vaccine expert, researcher, scientist, and CEO of Anixa Biosciences, told Healthline.
He explained that while kids are less susceptible to developing symptomatic infections when exposed to the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, they can still carry the virus — oftentimes with little to no symptoms.
However, by vaccinating those around them, the chances that children will be exposed to the coronavirus go down. This makes it less likely they will transmit the virus to others.
Or at least, that was what researchers hoped to prove.
Dr. Sara Browne, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego Health, said that previous trials have demonstrated the vaccine’s ability to protect against COVID-19.
“What has been less clear is the degree to which the vaccines prevent the SARS-CoV-2 infection itself,” she explained. “If the vaccines are less effective at preventing asymptomatic infection than they are at preventing disease, vaccine recipients might be protected from disease but could still spread the infection to others.”
So, researchers set out to show whether the vaccine itself could prevent transmission.
“They looked at the relationship between rates of vaccination in a community to see if this had an impact on the rates of infection observed in the unvaccinated community members, in this case children, since the vaccines are not authorized for them,” Browne explained.
And in support of their hypothesis, those researchers found that as vaccination rates went up, the rate of unvaccinated people testing positive for COVID-19 went down.
Source: healthline