Does the vaccine stop a person passing on the virus to others?
Though you may have the antibodies needed to quickly flush the virus from your system should it come into contact with it again, does the vaccine prevent you from passing on the disease to others asymptomatically?
Matt Hancock warned that it is still unknown to what extent the Covid-19 vaccine can prevent someone passing on the disease.
Appearing on BBC Breakfast, he said: “We know that this vaccine protects the person who’s been vaccinated. What we don’t yet know is the degree to which the vaccine reduces the chance of Margaret [Keenan, the first person in the world to receive the jab] passing it on asymptomatically.
“We think that that transmission risk, as it’s called, is much reduced by being vaccinated. But we need to watch that.”
Speaking on the same programme, Christine Tait-Burkard, assistant professor of immunology at the University of Edinburgh, said “every percentage” of people vaccinated should make a difference to the rate of transmission if a vaccine provides “viral immunity” and stops people shedding the virus.
“But that’s where we still have some question marks around some of the vaccines,” she added, “because that is actually parts that’s not being looked at in the clinical trials studies just now.”
