A man receives his first dose of the Moderna vaccine, in the Bronx, April 1, 2021.
The data suggest that “it’s much harder for vaccinated people to get infected, but don’t think for one second that they cannot get infected,” said Paul Duprex, director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh. “If Dr. Walensky had said most vaccinated people do not carry virus, we would not be having this discussion,” said John Moore, a virus expert at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
“This opens the door to the skeptics who think the government is sugarcoating the science,” Bach said, “and completely undermines any remaining argument why people should keep wearing masks after being vaccinated.” Follow-up data from clinical trials support that finding. In results released by Pfizer and BioNTech on Wednesday, for example, 77 people who received the vaccine had a coronavirus infection, compared with 850 people who got a placebo.