One Dose Of Covid Vaccine can stop Household Spread By Up To 50 percent: UK Study

A dose of the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines reduces the chances that someone infected with coronavirus will pass it on to other household members by up to 50 percent, according to an English-language study published Wednesday.

Research from Public Health England (PHE) found that those who became infected three weeks after receiving their first puncture were 38 to 49 percent less likely to transmit the virus to their household contacts than those who were not vaccinated.

“This is excellent news: we already know that vaccines save lives and this study is the most comprehensive data in the real world showing that they also reduce the transmission of this deadly virus,” said British Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

“It further reinforces that vaccines are the best way out of this pandemic, as they protect you and can prevent you from unknowingly infecting someone in your home,” he added.

The study drew data from more than 57,000 contacts in 24,000 households in which there was a laboratory-confirmed case who had received a vaccine, compared with nearly a million contacts from unvaccinated cases.

Previous studies have already shown that vaccination reduces a person’s risk of developing an asymptomatic infection in the first place by up to 65 percent, four weeks after a dose.

Homes are considered “high risk” settings for transmission, and “similar results could be expected in other settings with similar transmission risks, such as shared living quarters and prisons,” the PHE study said.

“Vaccines not only reduce the severity of the disease and prevent hundreds of deaths every day, we now see that they also have an additional impact in reducing the possibility of transmitting COVID-19 to other people,” said Mary Ramsay, director of PHE immunization.

Previous PHE studies have estimated that the successful launch of the vaccine in Britain had prevented 10,400 deaths in those over 60 by the end of March.

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